[ Past Josephine's desk, down the corridor of sunlit windows, and through the wicket, Skyhold's war table has been replaced by a tree. Grown into a tree. Been restored to the tree it was. The room has to be bigger than it is, to hold the reaching branches, but it is and it isn't. The being at the base of the tree is only the smudgy suggestion of a person that cannot be sitting carelessly cradled by the roots that crawl across the floor like a lord on a chaise, because it doesn't have any legs. But sort of is, somehow, anyway. ]
This is what happensโ
[ He's spoken before. Only elven at first, and broken like a child's, the wisp of him too weak to hold a thought larger than a word at a time, but he's made progress. ]
โwhen you spend all day withโ
[ Shifting. He is more than one thing, held together by will. They jostle. He's quiet too long, thread lost. ]
Treeties. That was it.
[ Tragic that progress means a pun, maybe, but he's not forcing her to be here. Not entirely. He's only following her a little bit. ]
[ ness has learned patience, in the year-and-more since catching the anchor.
it's almost meditative, in a way, sitting at the base of the war tree, letting her new friend hold court. she waits for him to collect the disparate pieces of himself, to coalesce his collected fragments into thought, and listens to the hum of the anchor, the whisper of the fade, her own heartbeat. it is not difficult to give him the necessary time, when time itself was once such a hard-won concept to the little wisps of him. change was a struggle too. he's learned a lot since she found his first fragment, a confused, blinking thing drawn to the magic of the anchor.
all that patience for treeties, though. ]
I didn't have to run through the Beyond collecting your fragments, My Friend. I could be resting.
[ the words hold no real rancor, come delivered with a smile. if anything, she's proudโproud of his cleverness and his progress, his rapidly-emerging personality.
fast friends, solas had said. as with many things, he was right. ]
Are you a spirit of puns, then? Remember, we were trying to give you a name. You must be more than My Friend.
Must I, [ is more ruminative than defiant. There's a hole where the defiance should beโthe lack of acceptance that pulled him into a rebellion and could pull him back out of the Fade, and in the meantime might bristle against being told what he must beโand he feels it, in a way. He feels his frayed edges reaching for something else, his thoughts trying to flow into something more complicated and instead flowing out of him entirely.
The ghostly suggestion of a torso lifts from the tree. The head above it is beginning to acquire ears. ]
This place has always had friends.
[ Because he's been here before. Maybe always. Maybe that's what he isโa well-tended fire of camaraderie among soldiers, scholars, scullery maids.
He doesn't have a hand to extend to her, but the idea of it is there in the twist of his shoulders once he's at the height of someone standing up. ]
[ she frowns, opens her mouthโthere's a difference between must meaning surely and must meaning i insistโbut then closes it again, remembering herself. why would a spirit know that? especially one as fragmented as her friend? they're lucky he can speak in full sentences these days; at first that would have been quite beyond him. ]
You deserve a name that says more about you, [ she says, and hopes it makes her meaning clearer.
when he rises, ness stands to join him, brushing fade-dust off the backs of her leather leg wraps. in the waking world, she's taken to wearing more human clothes, for the political expedience if nothing elseโsome humans still frown to see a woman in trousers, not to mention the field of thorns her particular background can present. in the beyond, though, she's always in what she still finds most comfortable: toes bare in her hunter's leathers.
the fade shimmers and flickers around them, skyhold-and-not, rough-hewn human stone flowing into the beautiful arched metalwork of elvhen ruins. she's never sure if that's a suggestion of skyhold's past, or a reflection of her companionโwhen she dreamt with solas, it shimmered the same. ]
Ironically, treaties.
[ they begin walking, following the path away from the war tree, through josephine's office. she's not really thinking about where they're going, just letting her feet take her where they willโwhich of course means she knows exactly where they're going.
the door to the rotunda swings open invitingly. ]
Or agreements, at least. Fereldan is getting tetchy about having an "Orlesian" force inside their borders, so I've been trying to unruffle some feathers. Do you know what that phrase means?
[ The idiom he supplies in answer is elven. So elven it references creatures the Dalish no longer have words for because they no longer exist. It lies there for a moment before he supplies another answer less natural: ]
To soothe tempers.
[ He drifts into the rotunda beside her. The paint on the walls is shifting, searching for a scene to settle into. The horizon line on one of the frescos shifts up, forms outraged eyes and molten mouth, and a moment later arranges that furious swell into a fortress.
He's watching it; he's watching her. He is not presently constrained by eyeballs. ]
They think of you as Orlesian because of the Chantry, [ isn't quite a question, but he pauses for confirmation. This is familiarโnot the details, but the cadence of discussing them. ]
[ there is no word in trade for the creatures the well supplies her in answer to his elven phrasing. she doesnt even know what she's looking at, truly, can't make the animal in front of her resolve into any sort of recognizable shape. it gives her a headache to try too hard for it, she's learned, so she lets the image pass.
morrigan would know the creature. morrigan might be bold enough to name it in trade. morrigan doesn't have the well, and never will. ]
Yes, [ she answers, and comes to the middle of the rotunda. solas' desk is here, more solid than anything in the fade usually is. it's messy, books and parchment spread haphazardly across the surface, quill sitting in an open inkwell as though he's just stepped out of the room, and will return soon. her fingers trace the whorls and lines of the wood grain, and she sighs, soft and wistful. ] I also wear a mask, when I go to Orlais. It shows that I play their Grand Game, and helps them take me seriously as a political player. Fereldans don't like it, though.
[ the fresco on the wall shifts, and ness frowns. with a nudge of will, she resolves it back into a familiar shape: two wolves howling on either side of her ceremonial sword, the inquisition's eye overseeing them all. ]
My friend painted these. [ a pause, then a chuckle, ] Not you My Friend, another friend. A friend in the waking world.
[ it's probably rude to call it "the real world" to someone who lives in the fade. ]
And a spirit probably shouldn't huff in amusement, on account of not needing to breathe, but he does. ]
Now I see the problem.
[ Maybe he does need a name. But โ not for the first time in his existence โ he doesn't have one. He stops to stare at one of the wolves, inexplicably caught. Outside of his or her focus, the frescos nearest to him shift in a call and response with the presence that's been drawn here. But what lingers here from the year before is stronger than anything his incomplete amalgamation of feelings can conjure. So the lines shift, but only enough to warp and pulsate the shapes they've already arranged into, like leaves disturbed by a breeze. ]
You could tell them that the Maker is a modern invention. And then tell them they are like children drawing blood over an insult they will not remember in the morning.
[ Arch. Melancholy. Both. He has more serious thoughts, too โ a familiar pattern, to ask and advise and ask some more, for reasons that dart formless in the murky water of his memories โ but they're hard. He is too many things with nothing solid holding them together. He retreats to, ]
You miss him. [ And, unbidden, one of those formless things managing to reach the surface long enough to gleam bright and silver: ] I'm looking for him.
[ ness snort-laughs, and muffles the sound into the back of her hand. she'd certainly like to tell all these human politicians that their maker is made up and their squabbles are silly, but somehow josephine has managed to convince her it would be a bad idea.
(if she has to say something good about being the inquisitor. at least it means someone sympathetic to elves and mages is in all these stupid meetings. at least she can speak on their behalf when othersโeven cassandra, constrained as she is as the divineโmay not. she wouldn't do anything to jeapordize that, much as she'd like to.
explaining that to a spirit seems like it might be a more difficult proposition than it could be to explain it to a mortalโespecially a spirit as fragmented as her friend.)
she's pondering how to phrase any of that to the spirit when he hits her rapidly with two separate statements that take the wind completely out of her. ]
[ first, distracted focus fixed on the fresco. But what she means sinks in afterwards โ less through logic, more through the fact that he is a spirit in the Fade, the disparate pieces of him sensitive to disparate thoughts โ and he amends, ]
No. Not me.
[ He turns toward her and flows closer, settling on the side nearest to the anchor that drew the first wisp of him to her hand before the rest of her, curiosity and hope and potential, gathered him up and made him stay. The indistinct lines of his face are sharper, with his focus turned inward, beginning to hint at facial features without managing to resolve into distinctive ones. ]
I was something else, but he was there when I became it.
[ Elven. He's grasping for other memories that aren't there. There's only the space around where they were. But some of that space that can be filled by what's been ruminated on here before. Beyond him, none of the frescos change, but space between them is suddenly there for another: a symmetrical line of trees, the back of a hooded figure with smoke rising from its head, another wolf large in the foreground. Snow blows into the rotunda from the white ground painted into the scene. ]
[ childhood with the clan taught ness little about elvhen, a year with solas taught her more; nearly two years teasing at the knowledge of the well has turned her slow understanding to conversational ability. complex sentences come easier to her now, vagaries of tense and subject clarified by accepting the language's inherent ambiguity. it's still not as clear to her as it was to solas, who spoke it like a song in his native tongue, but she can hold a conversation. it's harder than conversing in trade, of course, but in this case, she welcomes the challenge: better to focus on perfecting her phrasing than the ache of missing. ]
You were something else? A different quality, or...
[ she trails off as they watch the fresco appear. some formless dread, a foreboding she can't name, spreads slowly through her, and she wraps her arms around herself, trying not to let the feeling bleed into the fade around them. her friend is fragile, more susceptible to the influencing effects of the fade than even the most mutable spirits.
this is a thousand-piece puzzle she has only the barest edges of. dread tells her finding the rest of the pieces will hurt, and bites deeper because she knows that won't stop her: curiosity starts fires, just to wonder at how they burn. ]
He told me once that the first Elvhen were embodied spirits.
[ she glances sidelong at her companion. it's not a question, except for how she's desperate for an answer. ]
[ again, and this time he does not take it back. They were that. He was that. Solas, her friend, his friend, Wisdom.
He raises the ghostly suggestion of a hand to the mural, to the snow beside the shape of the wolf. His hand passing through the wall would not be so strange. Ghostly, as stated, and this is the Fade. But because it is the Fade, his hand doesn't pass through anything. There's space ahead to accept it, though it's more paint than snow, the figures still flat and unmoving. The mural is still a mural, and the mural is a doorway.
He withdraws his hand. Snaps out of it, a little, to give clearer confirmation. ]
That is where I saw him last. Will you come with me, lealathe?
[ Bright one,
And he is not proposing a trip to the wilderness of Orlais. Not really. What happened to him happened here, in the Fade; it doesn't have to be so far a journey. ]
[ she watches the spirit manipulate the fade with the ease of breathing, molding it like so much clay, and her heart catches in her throat.
ennaris wasn't raised as a mage. until the conclave, she was nothing but a hunter, and even now what magic she does have is stunted, blunt and vestigial and only awake at all by grace of the anchor. shallow as her pool of mana is, she's still heard and experienced enough to know trusting spirits is a dicey endeavour at the best of times. her friend hasn't been a danger to her yet, and he doesn't feel like a threat—but she lacks a mage's faculty with the beyond to even be sure she knows what a threat would feel like. solas would know if she could trust this spirit. solas would know its name. solas
isn't here. there's only her, and her friend, and she has to make her own decisions.
there's only a moment of hesitation before she takes a fortifying breath and smiles at the spirit at her side. no time to question this, no time to second-guess herself—she makes her decision, and lays her anchor hand on the mural. it's cold beneath her palm, solid and yielding at once—
[ The cold that swirls around them isn't cold, but the idea of it, as if remembering a snowy evening from the safety of a warm bed. Remember how your ear tips ached? Remember how the wind slipped past your hair to chill your scalp? Remember the ground beneath your knees, snow packed down tight enough for twigs and rocks to prod your shins, and the woods felt like they felt when the world was whole, and the herbs burning in the fire cut through the air with the scent of summer.
Remember the sense of a presence at your back? That's all there is โ the idea of something dangerous just out of sight. Dangerous and familiar, loved, mourned for. If Ennaris tries to turn it turns with her, uncatchable by even the corner of an eye. Behind them is only a sliver of wall, the room they left behind painted there in flat and angular fresco, and a sea of tall and ancient trees.
The spirit does not try to turn to look back. He drifts forward to the fire, partway, held back near to Ennaris by the same sort of urge that keeps a child within easy reach of its mother. By the fire something more solid but somehow less real than him is kneeling and saying, She reminds me of you. I will not take the eluvians from her. She reminds me of you. I'm sorry, my friend.
That is not how it went โ ]
That is not how it went. I said, They're stronger than you think, you know.
[ The form beside the fire recites it with him, two identical voices, and it looks up from the flames to consider its new company, though its eyes slide through and past the spirit to land on Ness instead. Violet eyes, vallaslin, and if he is a haunting he does not look haunted. There's wry, weary humor still written in the corners of his eyes, and it becomes impossible to tell which of them is speaking, elf or spirit. ]
It didn't matter what I said. He was going to kill me either way.
[ everything in the beyond is memory, ness reasons, is susceptible to the whims and opinions of those who first observed the events. she has become comfortable with ambiguity, with complexity, with the tension between known and unknown.
one moment, i see heroic grey wardens lighting the fire... the next, i see an army overwhelmed.
and you can't tell which is real?
it is the fade. they are all real.
her friend remembers fear, and so the memory will be fearful. it's not any more real than any other way to remember it. it's not any more real than how someone else might remember it. it's not any more real than solasโ ]
He wouldn't, [ ness can't hold the words back, reason lost, ] why would he? We had an eluvian. We have it still.
[ she knows because she enters it often, stands in the crossroads and tries to last longer each time, hopes dimly, stupidly, desperately to be something more than what she is:
a dead root of a dying people.
violet eyes and branches of blood stare back at her, implacable, and death stands at her back. ever out of sight, just in the corner of her eye, no matter how quickly she turns. she faces her friend, miserable, arms around herself against the chill of truth. ]
Solas isn't like this, [ she pleads, ] he's warm. He's kind. Please, let him be as I remember him.
As she remembers him, a shadow of him passes between them, Ness and spirit. Indistinct around the edges, more memory than person. His movement only shifts once and briefly, like a flicker of the light, into the furious predatory stalk of someone planning to cut down the fools who bound and corrupted an old friend.
The shape of him lowers onto one knee beside the fire and puts a hand to the elf's shoulder. You will have to explain your logic to me, my friend, he says, and it's as exhausted and skeptical as it is warm and kind, but certainly an improvement to the dead man before him, whose casual defiance begins to melt away. ]
That is better,
[ the spirit says, half-sigh, drifting closer to that imagined memory with a kind of hunger. As she remembers him. As they remember him. The memory of him looks up toward her and more warmth bleeds in. ]
[ it's almost crueler, she realizes, she shouldn't have askedโto get what she wants and to know that she has to be the one to choose to relinquish it.
not yet, though. ]
I don't understand, [ she steps forward, toward the shadow and the spirit. neither react to her getting closer, and she crouches down to look at both of them more closely. ] He wouldn't do this. He couldn't.
[ couldn't he?
youโtortured and killed my friend!
the shadow in front of her flickers, unable to make up its mind. somewhere behind them, a fire crackles to life, and the smell of smoke and burning flesh permeates the scene. ashes fall on her shoulders, only to dissolve in fade-green indecision.
it's such an annoying way to learn this lesson. couldn't it be cassandra instead? dorian? someone else she'd respected, put on a pedestal, anyone butโ ]
Solas, [ ennaris whispers, small and mournful, ] what did you do, vhenan? Who are you?
[ the shadow reaches for the spirit's faceโhis hands burn with magic, and are open-palmed in peace, and hold a dagger, all at once. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fade.
This is what happensโ
[ He's spoken before. Only elven at first, and broken like a child's, the wisp of him too weak to hold a thought larger than a word at a time, but he's made progress. ]
โwhen you spend all day withโ
[ Shifting. He is more than one thing, held together by will. They jostle. He's quiet too long, thread lost. ]
Treeties. That was it.
[ Tragic that progress means a pun, maybe, but he's not forcing her to be here. Not entirely. He's only following her a little bit. ]
no subject
it's almost meditative, in a way, sitting at the base of the war tree, letting her new friend hold court. she waits for him to collect the disparate pieces of himself, to coalesce his collected fragments into thought, and listens to the hum of the anchor, the whisper of the fade, her own heartbeat. it is not difficult to give him the necessary time, when time itself was once such a hard-won concept to the little wisps of him. change was a struggle too. he's learned a lot since she found his first fragment, a confused, blinking thing drawn to the magic of the anchor.
all that patience for treeties, though. ]
I didn't have to run through the Beyond collecting your fragments, My Friend. I could be resting.
[ the words hold no real rancor, come delivered with a smile. if anything, she's proudโproud of his cleverness and his progress, his rapidly-emerging personality.
fast friends, solas had said. as with many things, he was right. ]
Are you a spirit of puns, then? Remember, we were trying to give you a name. You must be more than My Friend.
no subject
The ghostly suggestion of a torso lifts from the tree. The head above it is beginning to acquire ears. ]
This place has always had friends.
[ Because he's been here before. Maybe always. Maybe that's what he isโa well-tended fire of camaraderie among soldiers, scholars, scullery maids.
He doesn't have a hand to extend to her, but the idea of it is there in the twist of his shoulders once he's at the height of someone standing up. ]
Tell me what you did today.
no subject
You deserve a name that says more about you, [ she says, and hopes it makes her meaning clearer.
when he rises, ness stands to join him, brushing fade-dust off the backs of her leather leg wraps. in the waking world, she's taken to wearing more human clothes, for the political expedience if nothing elseโsome humans still frown to see a woman in trousers, not to mention the field of thorns her particular background can present. in the beyond, though, she's always in what she still finds most comfortable: toes bare in her hunter's leathers.
the fade shimmers and flickers around them, skyhold-and-not, rough-hewn human stone flowing into the beautiful arched metalwork of elvhen ruins. she's never sure if that's a suggestion of skyhold's past, or a reflection of her companionโwhen she dreamt with solas, it shimmered the same. ]
Ironically, treaties.
[ they begin walking, following the path away from the war tree, through josephine's office. she's not really thinking about where they're going, just letting her feet take her where they willโwhich of course means she knows exactly where they're going.
the door to the rotunda swings open invitingly. ]
Or agreements, at least. Fereldan is getting tetchy about having an "Orlesian" force inside their borders, so I've been trying to unruffle some feathers. Do you know what that phrase means?
no subject
To soothe tempers.
[ He drifts into the rotunda beside her. The paint on the walls is shifting, searching for a scene to settle into. The horizon line on one of the frescos shifts up, forms outraged eyes and molten mouth, and a moment later arranges that furious swell into a fortress.
He's watching it; he's watching her. He is not presently constrained by eyeballs. ]
They think of you as Orlesian because of the Chantry, [ isn't quite a question, but he pauses for confirmation. This is familiarโnot the details, but the cadence of discussing them. ]
no subject
morrigan would know the creature. morrigan might be bold enough to name it in trade. morrigan doesn't have the well, and never will. ]
Yes, [ she answers, and comes to the middle of the rotunda. solas' desk is here, more solid than anything in the fade usually is. it's messy, books and parchment spread haphazardly across the surface, quill sitting in an open inkwell as though he's just stepped out of the room, and will return soon. her fingers trace the whorls and lines of the wood grain, and she sighs, soft and wistful. ] I also wear a mask, when I go to Orlais. It shows that I play their Grand Game, and helps them take me seriously as a political player. Fereldans don't like it, though.
[ the fresco on the wall shifts, and ness frowns. with a nudge of will, she resolves it back into a familiar shape: two wolves howling on either side of her ceremonial sword, the inquisition's eye overseeing them all. ]
My friend painted these. [ a pause, then a chuckle, ] Not you My Friend, another friend. A friend in the waking world.
[ it's probably rude to call it "the real world" to someone who lives in the fade. ]
no subject
And a spirit probably shouldn't huff in amusement, on account of not needing to breathe, but he does. ]
Now I see the problem.
[ Maybe he does need a name. But โ not for the first time in his existence โ he doesn't have one. He stops to stare at one of the wolves, inexplicably caught. Outside of his or her focus, the frescos nearest to him shift in a call and response with the presence that's been drawn here. But what lingers here from the year before is stronger than anything his incomplete amalgamation of feelings can conjure. So the lines shift, but only enough to warp and pulsate the shapes they've already arranged into, like leaves disturbed by a breeze. ]
You could tell them that the Maker is a modern invention. And then tell them they are like children drawing blood over an insult they will not remember in the morning.
[ Arch. Melancholy. Both. He has more serious thoughts, too โ a familiar pattern, to ask and advise and ask some more, for reasons that dart formless in the murky water of his memories โ but they're hard. He is too many things with nothing solid holding them together. He retreats to, ]
You miss him. [ And, unbidden, one of those formless things managing to reach the surface long enough to gleam bright and silver: ] I'm looking for him.
no subject
(if she has to say something good about being the inquisitor. at least it means someone sympathetic to elves and mages is in all these stupid meetings. at least she can speak on their behalf when othersโeven cassandra, constrained as she is as the divineโmay not. she wouldn't do anything to jeapordize that, much as she'd like to.
explaining that to a spirit seems like it might be a more difficult proposition than it could be to explain it to a mortalโespecially a spirit as fragmented as her friend.)
she's pondering how to phrase any of that to the spirit when he hits her rapidly with two separate statements that take the wind completely out of her. ]
You know him, you know Solas?
[ โhis friend, in the dirthโ ]
Wisdom?
no subject
[ first, distracted focus fixed on the fresco. But what she means sinks in afterwards โ less through logic, more through the fact that he is a spirit in the Fade, the disparate pieces of him sensitive to disparate thoughts โ and he amends, ]
No. Not me.
[ He turns toward her and flows closer, settling on the side nearest to the anchor that drew the first wisp of him to her hand before the rest of her, curiosity and hope and potential, gathered him up and made him stay. The indistinct lines of his face are sharper, with his focus turned inward, beginning to hint at facial features without managing to resolve into distinctive ones. ]
I was something else, but he was there when I became it.
[ Elven. He's grasping for other memories that aren't there. There's only the space around where they were. But some of that space that can be filled by what's been ruminated on here before. Beyond him, none of the frescos change, but space between them is suddenly there for another: a symmetrical line of trees, the back of a hooded figure with smoke rising from its head, another wolf large in the foreground. Snow blows into the rotunda from the white ground painted into the scene. ]
no subject
You were something else? A different quality, or...
[ she trails off as they watch the fresco appear. some formless dread, a foreboding she can't name, spreads slowly through her, and she wraps her arms around herself, trying not to let the feeling bleed into the fade around them. her friend is fragile, more susceptible to the influencing effects of the fade than even the most mutable spirits.
this is a thousand-piece puzzle she has only the barest edges of. dread tells her finding the rest of the pieces will hurt, and bites deeper because she knows that won't stop her: curiosity starts fires, just to wonder at how they burn. ]
He told me once that the first Elvhen were embodied spirits.
[ she glances sidelong at her companion. it's not a question, except for how she's desperate for an answer. ]
no subject
[ again, and this time he does not take it back. They were that. He was that. Solas, her friend, his friend, Wisdom.
He raises the ghostly suggestion of a hand to the mural, to the snow beside the shape of the wolf. His hand passing through the wall would not be so strange. Ghostly, as stated, and this is the Fade. But because it is the Fade, his hand doesn't pass through anything. There's space ahead to accept it, though it's more paint than snow, the figures still flat and unmoving. The mural is still a mural, and the mural is a doorway.
He withdraws his hand. Snaps out of it, a little, to give clearer confirmation. ]
That is where I saw him last. Will you come with me, lealathe?
[ Bright one,
And he is not proposing a trip to the wilderness of Orlais. Not really. What happened to him happened here, in the Fade; it doesn't have to be so far a journey. ]
no subject
ennaris wasn't raised as a mage. until the conclave, she was nothing but a hunter, and even now what magic she does have is stunted, blunt and vestigial and only awake at all by grace of the anchor. shallow as her pool of mana is, she's still heard and experienced enough to know trusting spirits is a dicey endeavour at the best of times. her friend hasn't been a danger to her yet, and he doesn't feel like a threat—but she lacks a mage's faculty with the beyond to even be sure she knows what a threat would feel like. solas would know if she could trust this spirit. solas would know its name. solas
isn't here. there's only her, and her friend, and she has to make her own decisions.
there's only a moment of hesitation before she takes a fortifying breath and smiles at the spirit at her side. no time to question this, no time to second-guess herself—she makes her decision, and lays her anchor hand on the mural. it's cold beneath her palm, solid and yielding at once—
she pushes, and allows the mural to pull. ]
three months. THREE months. three months......
Remember the sense of a presence at your back? That's all there is โ the idea of something dangerous just out of sight. Dangerous and familiar, loved, mourned for. If Ennaris tries to turn it turns with her, uncatchable by even the corner of an eye. Behind them is only a sliver of wall, the room they left behind painted there in flat and angular fresco, and a sea of tall and ancient trees.
The spirit does not try to turn to look back. He drifts forward to the fire, partway, held back near to Ennaris by the same sort of urge that keeps a child within easy reach of its mother. By the fire something more solid but somehow less real than him is kneeling and saying, She reminds me of you. I will not take the eluvians from her. She reminds me of you. I'm sorry, my friend.
That is not how it went โ ]
That is not how it went. I said, They're stronger than you think, you know.
[ The form beside the fire recites it with him, two identical voices, and it looks up from the flames to consider its new company, though its eyes slide through and past the spirit to land on Ness instead. Violet eyes, vallaslin, and if he is a haunting he does not look haunted. There's wry, weary humor still written in the corners of his eyes, and it becomes impossible to tell which of them is speaking, elf or spirit. ]
It didn't matter what I said. He was going to kill me either way.
psls never die
one moment, i see heroic grey wardens lighting the fire... the next, i see an army overwhelmed.
and you can't tell which is real?
it is the fade. they are all real.
her friend remembers fear, and so the memory will be fearful. it's not any more real than any other way to remember it. it's not any more real than how someone else might remember it. it's not any more real than solasโ ]
He wouldn't, [ ness can't hold the words back, reason lost, ] why would he? We had an eluvian. We have it still.
[ she knows because she enters it often, stands in the crossroads and tries to last longer each time, hopes dimly, stupidly, desperately to be something more than what she is:
a dead root of a dying people.
violet eyes and branches of blood stare back at her, implacable, and death stands at her back. ever out of sight, just in the corner of her eye, no matter how quickly she turns. she faces her friend, miserable, arms around herself against the chill of truth. ]
Solas isn't like this, [ she pleads, ] he's warm. He's kind. Please, let him be as I remember him.
really testing that theory sorry
As she remembers him, a shadow of him passes between them, Ness and spirit. Indistinct around the edges, more memory than person. His movement only shifts once and briefly, like a flicker of the light, into the furious predatory stalk of someone planning to cut down the fools who bound and corrupted an old friend.
The shape of him lowers onto one knee beside the fire and puts a hand to the elf's shoulder. You will have to explain your logic to me, my friend, he says, and it's as exhausted and skeptical as it is warm and kind, but certainly an improvement to the dead man before him, whose casual defiance begins to melt away. ]
That is better,
[ the spirit says, half-sigh, drifting closer to that imagined memory with a kind of hunger. As she remembers him. As they remember him. The memory of him looks up toward her and more warmth bleeds in. ]
Maybe we can stay here.
no subject
not yet, though. ]
I don't understand, [ she steps forward, toward the shadow and the spirit. neither react to her getting closer, and she crouches down to look at both of them more closely. ] He wouldn't do this. He couldn't.
[ couldn't he?
youโtortured and killed my friend!
the shadow in front of her flickers, unable to make up its mind. somewhere behind them, a fire crackles to life, and the smell of smoke and burning flesh permeates the scene. ashes fall on her shoulders, only to dissolve in fade-green indecision.
it's such an annoying way to learn this lesson. couldn't it be cassandra instead? dorian? someone else she'd respected, put on a pedestal, anyone butโ ]
Solas, [ ennaris whispers, small and mournful, ] what did you do, vhenan? Who are you?
[ the shadow reaches for the spirit's faceโhis hands burn with magic, and are open-palmed in peace, and hold a dagger, all at once. ]