Every war needs a base of operations, every rebellion a headquarters, and if they’re going to be freeing slaves and taking on recruits, then they’ll need more space —
So today, they saunter through the Vi’Revas, emerging into this corner of the Crossroads they’ve carved out for themselves. A tall and towering building awaits them, a blinking beacon on this floating chunk of land. Plans are taking shape in the back of Solas’ mind, ticking over necessary logistics: they’ll install protective wards, an arcane engine at the center to power its enchantments, set up spots for a kitchen and bedrooms, because one of the most aggravating side-effects of physical bodies is endless, unceasing hunger and exhaustion.
A formless spirit drifts along beside them, still coalescing, radiating benevolence and need and assistance. It wants to help. They’ll let it help, and it’ll find its purpose in so doing; this place has a malleable shape, clay to be formed into whatever they need.
Solas shoves the creaking front doors open, entering the hollow room at the heart of the lighthouse. There are sprawling empty chambers to be claimed above. It would be dusty, if dust existed here. It all has the air of—
Expectance. Waiting. This building wants to be made of use.
He looks up and up and up, to the spiraling staircase, the doors unfolding like a puzzle-box. “What do you think?” he asks, over his shoulder.
If it isn't obvious from his tone that he's being obnoxious on purpose, the friendly knock of Felassan's shoulder against Solas' arm as he catches up alongside him would probably do it. Further in, he turns a circle. He would be silent on the stone, barefoot and lightly dressed, if he weren't using a metal staff as a walking stick. The turn brings him around face to general-face-region with their spirit companion, at whom he smiles. Not a bad start to all the help they can get — though Felassan, at least, people person he is, will like the place much more when it isn't just the three of them.
"We'll catch up. We'll have time to," he says with more sincerity. Less running, less ducking, less hiding. "As long as they don't find a way to block us from the eluvians. Promise me you're the cleverest?"
Not the first time he's made that request, and not the last, even though he doesn't expect the answer to change one bit.
Later in the war, that question will wear thin and start to feel more like a death sentence than a promise: a wolf backed into a corner grown ever more desperate and frantic, ready to gnaw off its own leg to escape, tricks running low, seeing fewer and fewer options available to him. Promise me you’re the cleverest. He tries, he tries, he tries.
But that is for the future.
For now: the joke, the knock against his shoulder, the question, all of it keeps Solas grounded, makes him laugh. “Always,” he says, a cheeky call-and-response. With the flicker of a small smile that few aside from Felassan have seen — confident and comfortable in it — he adds, “Lies, treachery, and rebellion are my specialty, after all.”
He automatically touches the lyrium dagger at his hip; an instinctive reflexive tic, ensuring it’s still with him. The wolf’s fang, a weapon forged from blood. “The Vi’Revas will only answer to the dagger. As long as we keep this out of their hands, this place shall remain utterly inaccessible.”
Which does raise the question if someone else did hold his dagger someday, the key to this entire stronghold.
"Love to see June's face when he realizes," he says, with more familiarity than he'd be entitled to, if he cared about entitlement. He doesn't. Disrespect is a weapon he keeps ever at the ready. But really he's never spoken to June. He's only barely spoken to Mythal, despite her mark scrawled across his face. Sylaise told him to move once — that was a big day.
But Solas is familiar, he knows, in a way forged over thousands of years, before they ever walked the earth, before the likes of Felassan were even the faint sparks of wisps. Thousands of years of knowing Solas' truest impulse, because their truest impulses are all any of them were, and now they say lies, and treachery, and rebellion.
— they may have a point about that last one now. To be fair.
"They're afraid," Felassan says, because he can't outright say something like sorry your shitty cousins are calling you names, even though they're cool names and you're taking it well without ruining the mood — "and they should be. Come on, I want to see the view from the top."
“Your confidence, as ever, is inspiring,” Solas says, and the comment is dry but it is the truth. Whenever he flags or starts to doubt himself, Felassan is there. Whenever he needs someone to nip at his heels, Felassan is there.
He doesn’t want to stop and consider the day when that is no longer the case.
He starts walking first, long legs carrying him up the winding spiralling staircase in a familiar cadence. The interior of the lighthouse extends further up than it’s possible to reach on foot, but one can’t help the feeling that this building is unsculpted potential: raw material, open to be shaped by intent and need much like the Fade itself.
And they are, after all, very skilled sculptors.
“If you mean the very top, I believe I can—” Solas pauses by one of the doors. It’s meant to open into a regular room, empty living quarters, but he lays his hand against the cool stone and presses against reality and something changes. Blue light pulses in the doorway, space pinched and folded in on itself so that when they step through, they re-emerge disorientingly at the top of the lighthouse instead, standing on a balcony running around the exterior like a circular widow’s walk. The warm light of the lantern room hums closer than it should, and the Crossroads sprawls out around them, below their feet.
Maybe Felassan could have done that, but he certainly wouldn't have made it look so easy, passage blooming like a flower that was only waiting for permission and connected in precisely the correct place to walk rather than jump or fall out. He would be impressed, but then he'd have to be impressed ten times on a slow day, and after so many years a man becomes immune from awe, exempt from repetitive praise, and aware of his duty to protect against anyone getting a big head.
He leaves his staff against the wall before going out onto the balcony, where he plants his hand and vaults his legs over to sit on the railing with the careless confidence of someone who does not have to worry that a fall might do him significant harm. He would have time to handle that on the way down.
"Armory, garden, smithy, somewhere for people to spread out," he ticks off on his fingers. An incomplete list. If things go as planned, if enough people see sense, even what they create now will need to be expanded upon later. Maybe it will be a city someday. "If you're removing vallalsin, we should have somewhere set aside for that. Something to make it feel a little momentous, not like they're tracking you down at breakfast for it. Ceremony matters." Not to him. But to other people. "And — " Opening negotiations, pretending to expect pushback. " — I'm allowed to grow ten trees for every building."
Solas is less loose with his body language, a bit less nonchalantly casual; both by inherent nature and by the figurehead they’ve been trying to shape him into, his own personality malleable, being moulded into Dread Wolf Fen’Harel the longer this war goes on. He steps forward and leans his elbows against the railing, propping himself against it beside Felassan as he looks out over their corner of the not-exactly-Fade. A safe place for elves. For spirits. For all who decide to flock to their banner.
He makes a faint disgruntled noise at the itemisation of everything they’ll need, but he doesn’t argue. He sees the sense in it.
“Ten trees for every building,” he muses aloud instead. It’s a large number, but: “At least there’s space. You could fit a few on the pathways here. And then make your own island for a copse.”
I.e., put your forest somewhere else Solas won’t keep tripping over it.
Fair. More than fair. The skeptical narrowing of Felassan's eyes as he surveys the landscape, evaluating walkways and potential copse-island locations, is purely recreational.
"To start. Where they spread from there — "
Over years, over decades. Hardly any time at all. Though in the absence of strong wind or pollinators, any time might not be long enough. Maybe he'll bring in some bees.
" — is up to them."
He looks down at Solas.
"That's my unimportant thing we have to have because it makes me happy," he says, now you prompt tucked silently into his drawling trail-off.
Solas keeps his gaze forward, looking out across that empty landscape, waiting for some spark of inspiration to answer the question. He sees—
He sees nothing. Felassan can imagine new buildings and landscapes, but when Solas reaches for a similar idea, all he feels that simmering anger and frustration of a long-stymied conflict. A library, he thinks first; but they already have that downstairs, and he knows it will eventually fill with arcane studies and texts and notes from the best and brightest their movement has to offer. Research searching for the right ritual and the right weapon, a silver-tipped arrow to lodge in the heart of the Evanuris.
That is still war. It’s not unimportant; there’s strategic value in it. It feels, sometimes, as if he has forgotten how to prioritise anything that doesn’t have pointed strategic value. And thinking of what one might want for oneself is still relatively new and unfamiliar — new words, new verbs, I, I want — but he considers.
“A music room,” he says, at last. “I would like to hear and play music, here, if we’re to stay here long-term.”
For the first half of that silence Felassan watches Solas. For the second half he is merciful enough to avert his gaze back to the waiting canvas before them, but not merciful enough to change the subject and withdraw the expectation that Solas muster up an answer.
He begins to arrange things in his thoughts, the flow of people from need to need, efficiency weighed against balance. To carry swords and arrowheads from the smithy to the armory, they should pass through a garden, or stained glass, or the twenty trees those two buildings allow him. They have been running and hiding and whispering for so long; now that they will have somewhere to stand in the open, the view should not be so much worse than the one from slavery. The people will need reminders that the cost of freedom will not be their joy, in the end, and the life that's waiting for them on the other side of this struggle will have its beauties, too. They'll need —
"Ten instruments for every building," he answers without hesitation when Solas's answer interrupts, only half hyperbole and entirely pleased. Felassan has long accepted the shadows that cross his old friend's face as a necessary cost. To try to free him from the burden of being the strongest among them, the cleverest, the first to say enough, the name that sparks any confidence at all — there would be no way forward.
But Felassan still believes in an end, and so he still believes in cupping his hands around sputtering flames to make sure they last that long.
"If we recruit enough musicians, you can have an orchestra."
Solas is surprised into a laugh at that mental image: the Lighthouse symphonic.
Felassan is not only useful. The elf’s sense of humour, his incorrigible flippancy and puncturing of his friend’s self-importance, all of it keeps Solas sane. Keeps him in check, as much as one can.
“Instruments,” he says, musing, “are so inefficient.”
Music now is so different from the days when they were young, with a song in your soul, in the very air itself, wrought out of nothing but intention. Music now takes dexterity, fine-muscle control, movement of fingers and the pursing of lips. He wrinkles his nose in mock-distaste — what are instruments in comparison to all they’d known? what is a regular orchestra once you’ve wept to the keening song of dying Titans? — but in truth, it’s impressive too. What ingenuity in the craftsmanship, making music again out of breath and hollow wood and gut-strings and leathery skin stretched over a frame.
Perhaps this physical world isn’t entirely devoid of miracles.
“You’ll need to help lift the piano into the tower,” he adds, half-joking. “You have that to look forward to.”
Felassan has ever been his most fervent general, his strongest supporter. He had carried the rebellion on his shoulders throughout Solas' millennia in uthenera, had watched the People fall and fail and crawl their way to tenuous survival in a world determined to destroy them. He saw, more even than Solas himself, what a mangle has been made of the world, what the Veil has cost the elves and spirits both. He was loyal, once.
He was Solas' friend, once.
That is what stays his hand, in the end—not the friendship (he has killed too many friends to flinch at the prospect now), but the dissonance of the betrayal, the impossibility of it. It is no longer a surprise to be betrayed by those he would have once considered dear friends, but this—
The sting of it has mellowed, some, after some weeks between Felassan's defiance and their meeting in the flesh. If Felassan had come to him immediately...
He had not. It is not worth considering.
Solas' temper has cooled enough for this, to look his general hard in the eye across the ruins they made of their People's homes with no weapon in hand.
"Of all those who have betrayed our cause," he says, cool with the contempt he has always reserved for traitors, "yours is the turn I least suspected. Well done indeed, Slow Arrow."
"You shouldn't be awake," Felassan answers — or doesn't answer, letting the contempt wash past him and the squirm of disagreement over betrayed go unvoiced. What could he say? What could he say that Solas would hear? Every traitor has their reasons, and Felassan has made quick dispassionate work of executing his share, in his time, even as they named the promises they'd been made or the lovers and children whose safety was held over their heads.
This would only be quick if Felassan allowed it to be. It is too soon, and Solas should not be awake, and what Felassan lacks in deity-worthy power he may make up for with thousands of years' more experience working against the resistance of the Veil. He could probably walk away.
He's walked so far to reach him already, though. It's enough to make him ache like someone one hundredth his age.
Felassan perches on the crumbling remnant of what was once a towering wall, gnarled staff laid across his lap so he can bend a leg and dig a knuckle into the arch of one foot, and contemplates the Dread Wolf. Felassan last saw him mere weeks ago, and Felassan has not seen him in millennia. He looks different here, no part projection or reflection, in sunlight dappled through shifting branches. He looks like someone Felassan was never really afraid of, only for.
"But if you're going to insist," he continues, words friendly, tone conversational, but with a hard-toothed edge that conveys he is in fact perfectly aware they're arguing, "it's not the worst century for it. It's looking interesting so far."
Felassan's gift for dodging topics he would prefer not to speak on has been useful to them both in the past—Solas has even found it amusing, on occasion. The charm of it is somewhat lost in its being turned against him.
His expression remains frigid and impassive, unmoved by Felassan's attempt at levity.
"This is a century of ruin. Suffering. Death."
Death, not just in battle or accident, but inevitable. Death by aging, infirmity, illness—all things the elvhen should never have had to face, save for his rebellion. Torture, corruption, imprisonment of their spirit kin—the loss of who they are. None save Solas remain alive who know the emotion from which Felassan was born.
There was a time, not some hundred years past, that Felassan would have understood that.
"Do you find that so interesting?" he questions, arch, subtly mocking. "You prolong all of this, denying me the passphrase, so I suppose you must. Have the years made you so callow?"
His goal is not beyond him without the eluvians, Felassan knows that as well as he, but it will take time to acquire them now. Time, and effort—lies, manipulations, more... regrettable measures. A year, perhaps two, to put all the pieces in place. Barely more than a blink in the long scheme of their existence,
but a blink in which hundreds of thousands of spirits and elves will suffer and die, needlessly, senselessly. Because of Felassan.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the lighthouse.
So today, they saunter through the Vi’Revas, emerging into this corner of the Crossroads they’ve carved out for themselves. A tall and towering building awaits them, a blinking beacon on this floating chunk of land. Plans are taking shape in the back of Solas’ mind, ticking over necessary logistics: they’ll install protective wards, an arcane engine at the center to power its enchantments, set up spots for a kitchen and bedrooms, because one of the most aggravating side-effects of physical bodies is endless, unceasing hunger and exhaustion.
A formless spirit drifts along beside them, still coalescing, radiating benevolence and need and assistance. It wants to help. They’ll let it help, and it’ll find its purpose in so doing; this place has a malleable shape, clay to be formed into whatever they need.
Solas shoves the creaking front doors open, entering the hollow room at the heart of the lighthouse. There are sprawling empty chambers to be claimed above. It would be dusty, if dust existed here. It all has the air of—
Expectance. Waiting. This building wants to be made of use.
He looks up and up and up, to the spiraling staircase, the doors unfolding like a puzzle-box. “What do you think?” he asks, over his shoulder.
no subject
If it isn't obvious from his tone that he's being obnoxious on purpose, the friendly knock of Felassan's shoulder against Solas' arm as he catches up alongside him would probably do it. Further in, he turns a circle. He would be silent on the stone, barefoot and lightly dressed, if he weren't using a metal staff as a walking stick. The turn brings him around face to general-face-region with their spirit companion, at whom he smiles. Not a bad start to all the help they can get — though Felassan, at least, people person he is, will like the place much more when it isn't just the three of them.
"We'll catch up. We'll have time to," he says with more sincerity. Less running, less ducking, less hiding. "As long as they don't find a way to block us from the eluvians. Promise me you're the cleverest?"
Not the first time he's made that request, and not the last, even though he doesn't expect the answer to change one bit.
no subject
But that is for the future.
For now: the joke, the knock against his shoulder, the question, all of it keeps Solas grounded, makes him laugh. “Always,” he says, a cheeky call-and-response. With the flicker of a small smile that few aside from Felassan have seen — confident and comfortable in it — he adds, “Lies, treachery, and rebellion are my specialty, after all.”
He automatically touches the lyrium dagger at his hip; an instinctive reflexive tic, ensuring it’s still with him. The wolf’s fang, a weapon forged from blood. “The Vi’Revas will only answer to the dagger. As long as we keep this out of their hands, this place shall remain utterly inaccessible.”
Which does raise the question if someone else did hold his dagger someday, the key to this entire stronghold.
Don’t worry about it.
no subject
"Love to see June's face when he realizes," he says, with more familiarity than he'd be entitled to, if he cared about entitlement. He doesn't. Disrespect is a weapon he keeps ever at the ready. But really he's never spoken to June. He's only barely spoken to Mythal, despite her mark scrawled across his face. Sylaise told him to move once — that was a big day.
But Solas is familiar, he knows, in a way forged over thousands of years, before they ever walked the earth, before the likes of Felassan were even the faint sparks of wisps. Thousands of years of knowing Solas' truest impulse, because their truest impulses are all any of them were, and now they say lies, and treachery, and rebellion.
— they may have a point about that last one now. To be fair.
"They're afraid," Felassan says, because he can't outright say something like sorry your shitty cousins are calling you names, even though they're cool names and you're taking it well without ruining the mood — "and they should be. Come on, I want to see the view from the top."
no subject
He doesn’t want to stop and consider the day when that is no longer the case.
He starts walking first, long legs carrying him up the winding spiralling staircase in a familiar cadence. The interior of the lighthouse extends further up than it’s possible to reach on foot, but one can’t help the feeling that this building is unsculpted potential: raw material, open to be shaped by intent and need much like the Fade itself.
And they are, after all, very skilled sculptors.
“If you mean the very top, I believe I can—” Solas pauses by one of the doors. It’s meant to open into a regular room, empty living quarters, but he lays his hand against the cool stone and presses against reality and something changes. Blue light pulses in the doorway, space pinched and folded in on itself so that when they step through, they re-emerge disorientingly at the top of the lighthouse instead, standing on a balcony running around the exterior like a circular widow’s walk. The warm light of the lantern room hums closer than it should, and the Crossroads sprawls out around them, below their feet.
no subject
He leaves his staff against the wall before going out onto the balcony, where he plants his hand and vaults his legs over to sit on the railing with the careless confidence of someone who does not have to worry that a fall might do him significant harm. He would have time to handle that on the way down.
"Armory, garden, smithy, somewhere for people to spread out," he ticks off on his fingers. An incomplete list. If things go as planned, if enough people see sense, even what they create now will need to be expanded upon later. Maybe it will be a city someday. "If you're removing vallalsin, we should have somewhere set aside for that. Something to make it feel a little momentous, not like they're tracking you down at breakfast for it. Ceremony matters." Not to him. But to other people. "And — " Opening negotiations, pretending to expect pushback. " — I'm allowed to grow ten trees for every building."
no subject
He makes a faint disgruntled noise at the itemisation of everything they’ll need, but he doesn’t argue. He sees the sense in it.
“Ten trees for every building,” he muses aloud instead. It’s a large number, but: “At least there’s space. You could fit a few on the pathways here. And then make your own island for a copse.”
I.e., put your forest somewhere else Solas won’t keep tripping over it.
no subject
"To start. Where they spread from there — "
Over years, over decades. Hardly any time at all. Though in the absence of strong wind or pollinators, any time might not be long enough. Maybe he'll bring in some bees.
" — is up to them."
He looks down at Solas.
"That's my unimportant thing we have to have because it makes me happy," he says, now you prompt tucked silently into his drawling trail-off.
no subject
He sees nothing. Felassan can imagine new buildings and landscapes, but when Solas reaches for a similar idea, all he feels that simmering anger and frustration of a long-stymied conflict. A library, he thinks first; but they already have that downstairs, and he knows it will eventually fill with arcane studies and texts and notes from the best and brightest their movement has to offer. Research searching for the right ritual and the right weapon, a silver-tipped arrow to lodge in the heart of the Evanuris.
That is still war. It’s not unimportant; there’s strategic value in it. It feels, sometimes, as if he has forgotten how to prioritise anything that doesn’t have pointed strategic value. And thinking of what one might want for oneself is still relatively new and unfamiliar — new words, new verbs, I, I want — but he considers.
“A music room,” he says, at last. “I would like to hear and play music, here, if we’re to stay here long-term.”
sad awoo
He begins to arrange things in his thoughts, the flow of people from need to need, efficiency weighed against balance. To carry swords and arrowheads from the smithy to the armory, they should pass through a garden, or stained glass, or the twenty trees those two buildings allow him. They have been running and hiding and whispering for so long; now that they will have somewhere to stand in the open, the view should not be so much worse than the one from slavery. The people will need reminders that the cost of freedom will not be their joy, in the end, and the life that's waiting for them on the other side of this struggle will have its beauties, too. They'll need —
"Ten instruments for every building," he answers without hesitation when Solas's answer interrupts, only half hyperbole and entirely pleased. Felassan has long accepted the shadows that cross his old friend's face as a necessary cost. To try to free him from the burden of being the strongest among them, the cleverest, the first to say enough, the name that sparks any confidence at all — there would be no way forward.
But Felassan still believes in an end, and so he still believes in cupping his hands around sputtering flames to make sure they last that long.
"If we recruit enough musicians, you can have an orchestra."
zombie hand
Felassan is not only useful. The elf’s sense of humour, his incorrigible flippancy and puncturing of his friend’s self-importance, all of it keeps Solas sane. Keeps him in check, as much as one can.
“Instruments,” he says, musing, “are so inefficient.”
Music now is so different from the days when they were young, with a song in your soul, in the very air itself, wrought out of nothing but intention. Music now takes dexterity, fine-muscle control, movement of fingers and the pursing of lips. He wrinkles his nose in mock-distaste — what are instruments in comparison to all they’d known? what is a regular orchestra once you’ve wept to the keening song of dying Titans? — but in truth, it’s impressive too. What ingenuity in the craftsmanship, making music again out of breath and hollow wood and gut-strings and leathery skin stretched over a frame.
Perhaps this physical world isn’t entirely devoid of miracles.
“You’ll need to help lift the piano into the tower,” he adds, half-joking. “You have that to look forward to.”
surpriiiiise
Felassan has ever been his most fervent general, his strongest supporter. He had carried the rebellion on his shoulders throughout Solas' millennia in uthenera, had watched the People fall and fail and crawl their way to tenuous survival in a world determined to destroy them. He saw, more even than Solas himself, what a mangle has been made of the world, what the Veil has cost the elves and spirits both. He was loyal, once.
He was Solas' friend, once.
That is what stays his hand, in the end—not the friendship (he has killed too many friends to flinch at the prospect now), but the dissonance of the betrayal, the impossibility of it. It is no longer a surprise to be betrayed by those he would have once considered dear friends, but this—
The sting of it has mellowed, some, after some weeks between Felassan's defiance and their meeting in the flesh. If Felassan had come to him immediately...
He had not. It is not worth considering.
Solas' temper has cooled enough for this, to look his general hard in the eye across the ruins they made of their People's homes with no weapon in hand.
"Of all those who have betrayed our cause," he says, cool with the contempt he has always reserved for traitors, "yours is the turn I least suspected. Well done indeed, Slow Arrow."
:O
This would only be quick if Felassan allowed it to be. It is too soon, and Solas should not be awake, and what Felassan lacks in deity-worthy power he may make up for with thousands of years' more experience working against the resistance of the Veil. He could probably walk away.
He's walked so far to reach him already, though. It's enough to make him ache like someone one hundredth his age.
Felassan perches on the crumbling remnant of what was once a towering wall, gnarled staff laid across his lap so he can bend a leg and dig a knuckle into the arch of one foot, and contemplates the Dread Wolf. Felassan last saw him mere weeks ago, and Felassan has not seen him in millennia. He looks different here, no part projection or reflection, in sunlight dappled through shifting branches. He looks like someone Felassan was never really afraid of, only for.
"But if you're going to insist," he continues, words friendly, tone conversational, but with a hard-toothed edge that conveys he is in fact perfectly aware they're arguing, "it's not the worst century for it. It's looking interesting so far."
no subject
His expression remains frigid and impassive, unmoved by Felassan's attempt at levity.
"This is a century of ruin. Suffering. Death."
Death, not just in battle or accident, but inevitable. Death by aging, infirmity, illness—all things the elvhen should never have had to face, save for his rebellion. Torture, corruption, imprisonment of their spirit kin—the loss of who they are. None save Solas remain alive who know the emotion from which Felassan was born.
There was a time, not some hundred years past, that Felassan would have understood that.
"Do you find that so interesting?" he questions, arch, subtly mocking. "You prolong all of this, denying me the passphrase, so I suppose you must. Have the years made you so callow?"
His goal is not beyond him without the eluvians, Felassan knows that as well as he, but it will take time to acquire them now. Time, and effort—lies, manipulations, more... regrettable measures. A year, perhaps two, to put all the pieces in place. Barely more than a blink in the long scheme of their existence,
but a blink in which hundreds of thousands of spirits and elves will suffer and die, needlessly, senselessly. Because of Felassan.