[ He is about to joke. It is fairly clear. But even so, it's a subdued sort of joke, mindful of the fact that something that truly lurks in Solas's nightmares is unlikely to actually be funny. ]
The archdemons they kill are not merely named for the old gods of Tevinter, nor for the Evanuris that precede them. They are those very selfsame dragons, who once had been bound to the Evanuris themselves. With every Blight, with every Archdemon killed, an Evanuris became no longer immune to death.
And once they could be killed, they were, if not by the act itself, then by their fellows— what better source of power, after all, than a god? [The irony in his voice keeps the term a mockery, but he's grim enough that it's a near thing.] By the time I was able to see it, there were only two left alive; Ghilan'nain, and Elgar'nan.
What would have happened, if I had lost faith? If I had simply stopped trying to save them, and let the world go on however it pleased? One by one, the Evanuris fell to desperation and sought a way to breach their prison. It nearly worked, once, why not again? And yet, one by one, they failed, and the Wardens sent them to their deaths.
And when Elgar'nan's Blight died with Lusacan, the Veil would have fallen on its own, anchorless and void of power.
You were right. It would have been much the wiser to simply allow the mortals their chance. But instead... this. So much for the Wisdom of the Dread Wolf.
[ Some of this is news. Some of it is not. All of it is dramatic, and whenever Solas speaks with this kind of gravitas Felassan has always had two competing impulses: to shiver, and to mock. And he's pretty good at multitasking. He makes a sound somewhere between a snort and laugh, a single syllable puff, but it isn't unaffected. Something shaky around the edges of it. Like laughing at a ghost story but also keeping a lantern lit. ]
We live and we learn.
[ Trite. Dry. Typically he cherishes any rare occasion when Solas tells him he was right about something; this time, not so much.
Felassan had never entirely decided that the Veil shouldn't fall. He'd decided he wouldn't take the eluvians from Briala; he'd decided she deserved a chance to fight for her people. Their people. He'd decided they weren't weak, diseased things who should be glad to see their miserable era end, even if it ended in blood and chaos, but people who could and should be allowed to choose their own way.
He tries to imagine it now. Just waiting, after all, probably no more than another thousand years. Watching the Veil fray and dissolve, as destructive as a wildfire and as little anyone's fault — save Elgar'nan's, perhaps, if his death could only come by choice in the end, alone in the Black City with no one left to command. Would he have been sorry? Sorrier than he is now, every time he looks at Beleth and Solas in what should be the blackest dark and sees their sleeping faces cast green by the glow of that damned anchor?
Hard to say. ]
We might have warned them it was coming and given them time to prepare. We still could, if we find a way. If there is nothing but you it could be tied to.
From their understanding, to bring down the Veil is to [What was Varric's colorful turn of phrase? Ah, yes:] 'drown the world in demons'. I cannot deny that there will inevitably be casualties, though perhaps more than only Vhenan would take such a warning seriously, this time.
Who is to say? I have never been Elgar'nan's equal for sheer power.
[No one has. That was the benefit of being the first and the most ruthless; so much of what he became was fueled by blood and death and the willingness to take whatever course of action he needed, in order to dominate those around him. Elgar'nan had no mother, but if such a woman had ever been, he would have eaten her.]
Perhaps one Elvhen life alone cannot hold up the veil at all, not for long. I will endeavor to give you the opportunity to find out... [He did not miss the lack of an answer, Felassan. He will not chain you to his side, if you wish to go. But he will mourn afresh.] ...If you are willing to be dragged back into Thedas on my behalf, as I have said.
You will not be dragging me anywhere, wolfling, [ is cheerful in its challenge; equally cheerful is, ] but offered the choice I wouldn't leave you again, or Beleth. If that makes me a beast and a hypocrite... I am elvhen. It's to be expected.
[ Cheerful, but still something real beneath it. There was a time he wanted to be better than that. A ship that sailed long before now, really. The best anyone can hope is that it might someday be called back to port. ]
Would it have drowned the world in demons?
[ Perhaps Solas is tired of answering the question. But Felassan asks it with as much concern for the demons — the spirits — as for the mortals, at least. He doesn't need to tell Solas: it is a difficult and startling thing, for the metaphysics of the world you inhabit to be suddenly changed. It was no different in reverse, when the Veil fell. A great expanse. A trembling terror. This new void in us that ceases the spirit and makes us suddenly meat. ]
Were the Veil to fall, there would be a time of chaos and confusion, which would eventually settle into stability as the world once again went along its more natural paths, and people began to live fuller lives, and longer spans. But in the moment of its fall...
Banal Nadas. In Minrathous, certainly, and other such places, so steeped and founded upon misery the loss of the veil would bring many spirits of pride, rage, and despair which already press upon the veil. But I believe most places, and most people, would survive.
The effects would be most profound at the ritual site itself. Erecting the Veil took enormous energy, more than I had even anticipated, and therfore logically, taking it back down again would shed much of that energy. It is likely that the resulting—
[He stops, abruptly, recognizing that he has gone a step too far, so engrossed in imagining the technicalities of it, the fine-tuned intermingling of tone-layers and self-reinforced balances, all cascading away from one another, melting down and out to vent away the hated veil and its stubborn division. Solas had forgotten that the implications... Ah, but he's already paused too long. It is too late to hide the truth.]
...The resulting explosion would have a significant radius.
[ Even before Solas falls abruptly silent, Felassan has already lost his half-smile — something he could hide but rarely does, whenever Solas or Beleth alike treat him to a lengthy explanation, their interest radiating. Even if the topic is so serious as this. He's smiling to himself, on his end of their little birds. Then Solas says therefore, logically, and Felassan, so practiced at following him, skips easily ahead along his trajectory. And he stops smiling. ]
Of course.
[ It makes sense. There was no small amount of damage at the site of the Veil's creation. Felassan became quite intimately familiar with the rubble, searching it as he did for any sign, any scrap. ]
And you planned to survive that by...?
[ He doesn't need to hear the answer. No answer would also be an answer. There's a rustling sound, on his end of their connection. The brittle leaves beneath him as he shifts out of his comfortable recline against a tree for the first time since this conversation began. ]
[He does not respond at first. And then, abruptly, as if it must be forced out.]
I did not.
[The pause now is less significant.]
Of course I had... ideas. Contingencies. Inventions. Like so much of Arlathan, I am a holdover from a time long-dead. I have no wish to die alone, but—
[The orb would originally have served as a buffer, a way to absorb many of the energies, and offer Solas a greater chance at survival, but the orb was in shattered bits in a box in the Lighthouse, unless Rook had thrown it out for the worthless junk it appeared to be... And the dagger had no such capabilities, by comparison.]
The reality was that nothing I could build in so little time would be able to withstand a tenth of the potential force.
[ The flash of anger he feels might have carried someone with less experience in holding their tongue into saying something cruel. Anything cruel, however misdirected, just to give it somewhere to go. Something like: it would be just like Solas to remake the world and leave everyone else to learn how to live in it without him.
But Felassan is Felassan, so the impulse instead manifests as only a brief, foreboding pause before he says, with perfect calm, ]
[Solas knew it was a mistake the moment he said it. He had considered lying, of course, but— strangely, he had wanted to tell someone. To tell Felassan. Now, in the wake of such a confession, Solas wonders that he even has the capacity for such naivety any longer. What had he expected? For Felassan to understand? For Felassan not to be upset? For it to be alright? Too late now, for anything but regrets.]
[ The affirmative sound Felassan makes is nearly all the response Solas receives. But by the time Felassan is on his feet, just short of tucking the bird away, he adds, ]
Stay there.
[ He has not forgotten the last terrible months of the rebellion, when Solas evaded Felassan’s every attempt to talk about a different dangerous plan.
This one, at least, Solas has already been talked out of. There’s little reason to hurry, but he does. And there’s little reason to be angry — it didn’t happen, it won’t happen, and who is Felassan to be cross with anyone else for walking open-eyed into an avoidable death? Little reason, but he is anyway, the whole time he’s flying, and when he drops to land and folds outward into elf in the same motion so he hardly has to stop moving, and when he crosses the threshold and sees Solas standing at the window and strides over with high, cold winter air still hanging around him, turning Solas by the shoulders so they face one another with the sort of grip that suggests a prelude to a dressing-down.
It isn’t the fight that goes out of him then, exactly, seeing Solas’s face up close. But the words do. He’s still for a moment, and then his firm, fierce hold on Solas’s shoulders moves to a firm, fierce grip on either side of his face, to pull him down —
Not to kiss. An older instinct than that, pressing forehead to forehead and nose to nose, urgently, and then just as urgently winding his arms around to pull Solas’s face into his neck. ]
[What is coming, Solas does not know, except that whatever form of retribution Felassan chooses to take, it will be one he deserves. There is a moment, fierce and gripping, when anything might happen; he might strike him, or shake him, or simply turn on his heel and be gone again. Solas stares back at him, wordless, searching for speech, for the right thing to say—
The violence in Felassan's love is irrefutable; that it is love, no less so.]
Ir abelas. [His voice is quiet, muffled against Felassan's shoulder.] Ir abelas.
[And perhaps that is his great failing: that he is a coward at heart, and knows it, and can do nothing more than to beg forgiveness and cling like a child.]
I could not let her die, when I might save her. I could not kill her too, and save myself instead.
[ Felassan never seethed at him about the way magic left them all like air being knocked from their lungs, wheezing for breath — about the mass funerals and the people who spent the rest of their lives, however long they were, walking lost and hollow-eyed through the ruins of their homes — about spirits who had been friends and family, the People as much as anyone with flesh, suddenly only reachable through the hazy curtain of sleep — about loving him and loving him and not being worthy of an explanation or farewell before he was left behind to answer people who asked where is he and what would he have us do for a century, or longer, until they instead began to treat him like he was mad to search and to hope. He will never seethe at him about it. It was a long time ago, and Felassan could take it. He took it.
But he thinks: Solas would have done the same to Beleth. He'd learned nothing. He would have listened to no one, let alone asked for help or ideas. He'd have brought a tidal wave of magic down onto them, just as he'd once pulled it out like a warning tide. He'd have left her in the wreckage without regard for what she thought or what she wanted.
And died. He'd have died.
Felassan can seethe about that. He holds Solas to him with his jaw clenched and his fingers digging in too hard, impervious to apologies. Less impervious to the explanation. He shakes his head, a tight jerk of a motion, like it doesn't matter and he doesn't want to hear it, but he hears it anyway. Against his will it seeps in and softens his grip. ]
Be quiet.
[ It's gentler, though, than his hands had been. ]
[Solas struggles with obedience for a while, stubborn moment, and then turns his face against the shoulder of Felassan's archer-strength. He gives over into silence. It was true; he'd learned nothing. True also, that that too was part of what necessitated gathering all the most powerful women in his life together and letting them shout him down until he was a weeping creature of tear-tracks and blood-wet bruises. He had wanted to run, wanted to be done with it all; no more duty, no more defending himself, no more moral conundrums endlessly tugging. No more body, or physical world, or the reality of having been the hand, intentional or otherwise, that had snuffed out the lives of everyone he had ever loved.
Except her. Except her violet eyes and the spray of freckles, and the way she tilted her head and smirked when she teased him, the way she could never bear to kiss him less than twice. All the loving ways that he did not deserve. At the end of it, faced with the reality of his Veil, his Great Mistake, killing her too... he had balked. And she had bent down and forgiven him, and begged him to let it go, to let her die under the pressure of entropy's cruel hands and then—
—and then she had, like some strange, impossible reward, demanded to come with him, to step into the Fade and the future both. And now they would have time.
Solas' hands come up, fists clenched in Felassan's shirt, and he thinks he should weep, but the tears will not come. There is only relief, and the sobbing breaths of air which could mean anything: laughter and grief intermingled.]
[ Felassan holds onto him long enough to be certain that, no, with force of will and press of cheek to temple he can't physically meld with another of the elvhen so that his skin becomes their skin and anything that means to hurt them, including and especially themselves, will have to literally go through him first.
— no, he is not so dramatic as that. Not consciously. But he does hold onto him for a length of time that would hold a noisier, wetter expression of his anger and heartache, if he did that. If he'd ever done that. ]
You can't.
[ Solas is gripping him, and shaking with his heavy breaths. Felassan doesn't do any squirming or pulling to encourage him to stop, to disentangle and look him in the eye, but he does relax his iron hold on him, now, finally, until it's just one hand resting on his shoulder, one thumb rubbing his scalp, and he would find no resistance if he stepped away. ]
You can't leave her that way. Whatever happens, whatever unforeseen shit is waiting past the horizon, however sure you are that it is the only way. If you have time to plan, you have time to tell her.
[ He would ask it for himself as well — but for Beleth, he thinks Solas might promise. ]
[Solas really does laugh then, pained and weak and honest. He does not step away, but he too eases back a hair, raising his head ever-so-slightly, so that he may speak the truth between them, like a secret.]
I had attempted to leave her many times. To convince her to find another— hoped she would find a kinder home for her heart. She deserves better. [He suspects that he will spend all his life learning, striving to be that better man.] But she was with me, when Elgar'nan fell, and has made it very clear that whatever happened afterwards, whatever I did, she would be with me.
[Which is... terrible, every bit as much as it is a poignant tether on his heart. How could he tear it all down and die in the cleansing conflagration, if she would die too? He had thought her embroiled in the South's chaos, well-distant and lost to him. Coming to him there and then, at the key moment, had been a masterful stroke, and so very like her.]
If we were in a contest of wit and trickery, she defeated me beyond any possible doubt. This chain... it is her compromise— her choice. No ally would accept me unbound; even the kindest among them wished a far harsher punishment, in answer for my part in the fall of Arlathan, against the Titans, not merely to preserve the Veil. [Harding had been... particularly unpleasant to bear. They had been friends once, and once she knew he was the Dread Wolf, had seen his memories, his regrets... Those crimes were all he became to her. To any of them. Except for Beleth.] She convinced me. I went willingly into these bonds, trusting her judgement, and I will not leave her again, so long as she lives.
[ It’s enough. Enough to ease the clenched fist of fear in his chest, the immediate impulse not to mourn this thing that didn’t happen but to do something to ensure it never would. (And the arrogance, to think there was any promise left for him to extract, with Beleth already on the case.) And in turn that’s enough to make him smile, finally, at her craftiness and her perfect timing, and then to widen the scope of Felassan’s attention until it can reach further than dead or not dead to the time before it, when Solas made his calculations and came to his understandings.
There is something just about it. Of course. Felassan worries what it makes him, to think mortality is not to bad for other people while he harbors hopes of being brought home from death. What would it make Solas, in turn, if he had been willing to kill so many to tear down the Veil, but not to die? The monster they imagined him. Felassan can see that. But he can’t feel it. He can only feel…
He’s turned his head, found enough space to trail the tip of his nose against the line of Solas’s cheekbone. The beginning of something softer and sorrier, threaded with secondhand loneliness, borrowed from his imagined vision of Solas at the top of his tower again, sequestered with his diagrams and plans, the Lighthouse emptier and more silent than Felassan ever saw it.
But he feels something else, too. Soft steps and someone behind, with that combination of subtle signs from every sense that sometimes feels like an extra one. He doesn’t let go of Solas’s shoulder, but he hinges away, opening the space between them like a book so they can both see her. ]
[ She hadn't meant to eavesdrop. She'd seen Felassan rushing into the house and then to the library from her place in the kitchen, tying up bundles of leaves for drying. And at first, had thought nothing of it. Felassan had moods sometimes, and he was certainly allowed them -- and truthfully, she really had to get these hung up before the sun dipped below the horizon. Which she couldn't do if she had an elf draped over the kitchen table requesting food and kisses.
(She could refuse him. But she won't.)
But once the task is done, and Felassan still hasn't dropped in, she goes to see what he and Solas are up to, and, perhaps, see if they wouldn't mind another hand (or anything else) for it. But when she hears her name come up, she freezes just outside the door. Unworthy, perhaps, but... well. No one, even the Herald of Andraste herself, is perfect, is she?
But she does have to enter now, before her lingering goes from innocent to straight up nosy -- and even if she didn't care, she had her own thoughts to share. ]
If there had been a path that led to your freedom wholly, I would have gladly taken it. But... I had little power to sway things in my favor, aside from my pleas. [ And she'd had to. She still remembers that dark room, full of strangers and enemies to Solas, begging them to empathy. Morrigan, the woman who had stood next to her for years, also unsure. ] Maybe one day, when tempers are cooler, when injuries are faded scars, we can reconvene.
[ She steps up to them, resting one hand on Felassan's waist, and the other reaching for the hand that bore the weight that she'd carried, once. ]
And furthermore, I rather think I've decided what I deserve, and it's this. [ Felassan to one side, pressed against Solas, and he on the other. It's true that she could have lived a simpler life, with a different man, a quiet life of little complaint. But hadn't she already escaped that peaceful mediocrity once? ] I'm not sure how the conversation came about, but I will tell you this much -- we will figure things out, together. Even this. [ She squeezes his scarred hand, and reaches up to give them both a kiss on the nose. ] That, I think, is what I deserve.
[Solas turns as she speaks, already reaching towards her even as her hand goes out to him. And when he pulls her closer, inside their circle of warmth and tears, he presses a grateful kiss to her temple, inhaling the scent of her hair. Beautiful, wise, powerful, and gracious; he does not deserve her protection, but she would defy the world only to offer it.]
Felassan wishes to see me freed. [It's as good an explanation as any, as to how the conversation came about.] I'm not certain it is wise, or even possible; but it seemed necessary that I at least absolve you of any fault in tying me to the Veil. As you said: if there was a better path, one they would have accepted, you would have given it.
[Solas does not believe in gods, and has precious little confidence in men, but if he carries any kernel of real faith in him, it in her promise to him, to protect him. Whatever it takes.
He accepts his own kiss with soft eyes and a tiny smile.]
[ Felassan accepts his nose-kiss with a smile, and lolls his head over against his own hand where it's holding the crest of Solas's shoulder to look at Beleth while they talk. To blame her had not occurred to him, and doesn't now except in the form of recognizing that Solas and Beleth are agreeing it wasn't her fault. He pulls one of her curls straight and lets it spring back into form. Not even a false prophet deserves this punishment, he could tease — but he's still tense and tender, in equal parts, so the thought stays a faint gleam in his eyes. ]
Ar-melana dirthavaren, revas vir-anaris.
[ It comes out a little sing-song, even for elvhen, like it's a skipping rhyme for children instead of the only oath he's ever freely and sincerely taken. He continues in the old tongue: ]
I would see you free as well, before I'll rest.
[ They have not discussed the well. Perhaps this isn't the time to start. But it is important to have on the record, at least. ]
[ Solas freed. She likes the sound of it. Removing the burden that she had been unable to avoid being placed on him -- she doubted anyone would have been able to avoid it. The Veil was to remain, and there was only one left to power it -- though maybe if all three of them...? No -- they'd never accept it. ]
I agree with Felassan. I think we could build a convincing case, when that day comes to reconvene, to free you. You have no dragon to stop your death as the others did -- I'm sure people will see reason, if they wish the Veil to remain, to not have it hinge on a single elf. And if they don't want the Veil...
[ She shrugs. Done and dusted, in that case. She turns to Felassan -- allowing his manhandling of her curl without complaint -- with a look of temporary confusion. Her as well -- ? She'd already freed herself -- ah.
The whispers rise up, when she focuses on them. They do not sound particularly approving, so she bids them rest again.
And so she reaches to lean against Felassan reassuringly, as much as she can, when she's already so intertwined with them. ]
I think the Veil is a more pressing matter than yet another fragment of Mythal crawling out of someone's back pocket to start barking orders at me. Morrigan surely would know, if anyone did, and I assure you that she can't boss me around. You needn't let it press on your mind. There are other concerns to consider.
Rook is not here to say, and Kion has earned no spite from me. [From his own Solas, perhaps, but that was another world, another life, another Wolf. Solas shakes his head slightly, a moot point acknowledged] But it has been made clear that the welfare of the world is no longer our responsibility to shoulder. We will outlive her, and her Veilguard. That, I think, is reward enough.
[Yes, and what if Rook's grandchildren wish to reverse what their ancestor had fought to secure? Solas wonders. But it would take a great toll to divide the Veil from him now, spirit, blood, and flesh... And still, he is not sure it is wise to try. But there is time.]
If even a sliver of her yet remains, I cannot permit it to hold any power over you. Morrigan is fortunate that she retains memory alone, and no part of that conscious mind, else she would present a threat. Though she is your friend, she is ruthless, and I—
[He reaches across the small distance between them, and with one arm still around Felassan, still touching her own from wrist to elbow where it's wound around them both, Solas gently cups her cheek, letting his thumb brush there where ink once lay. He remembers them, those pale green whorls, the smoky hearth of Sylais' house artistically rendered, marking Beleth with proprietary force. He had grown used to it, and loved her face even then, but to see her made free... He is grateful.]
I knew what it was, once, to be held by that power. Nothing is worth the risk to you. Not for me.
[ Beleth begins to scheme, and Felassan begins to smile, settling his arm around her shoulders. What a lovely thing, to have an ally against Solas's defeatism. More than an ally. She could and would see to it on her own, he thinks. Indomitable. And it calms the tense clench in his chest to know that the future where Solas is finally and fully unbound lies ahead of them, as fixed as any future can be, even if Felassan isn't there to see it.
And here, the other side of the coin: a more-than-ally against Beleth's minimization of herself. Felassan doesn't begin to stir to argue with her himself. His eyebrows quirk the second before Solas begins to speak in an expectant sort of expression, like someone waiting for the twist in a story they already know, which shift into something almost smug, like see there, when the expected lines arrive on schedule. This, too, is fixed.
Though the mention of what Solas knows of being bound by Mythal does shrink his smile down to a whisper of itself and tighten his fingers on Solas's shoulder for a moment. Whatever is left of her, Felassan would like to kill himself. For both of their sakes. Perhaps even a little for his own.
But like all things, it will have to be done in whatever way it can be done, not whatever way one might dream. ]
Edited (making it less bad) 2025-12-31 17:15 (UTC)
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[ He is about to joke. It is fairly clear. But even so, it's a subdued sort of joke, mindful of the fact that something that truly lurks in Solas's nightmares is unlikely to actually be funny. ]
They are doing their bests.
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The archdemons they kill are not merely named for the old gods of Tevinter, nor for the Evanuris that precede them. They are those very selfsame dragons, who once had been bound to the Evanuris themselves. With every Blight, with every Archdemon killed, an Evanuris became no longer immune to death.
And once they could be killed, they were, if not by the act itself, then by their fellows— what better source of power, after all, than a god? [The irony in his voice keeps the term a mockery, but he's grim enough that it's a near thing.] By the time I was able to see it, there were only two left alive; Ghilan'nain, and Elgar'nan.
What would have happened, if I had lost faith? If I had simply stopped trying to save them, and let the world go on however it pleased? One by one, the Evanuris fell to desperation and sought a way to breach their prison. It nearly worked, once, why not again? And yet, one by one, they failed, and the Wardens sent them to their deaths.
And when Elgar'nan's Blight died with Lusacan, the Veil would have fallen on its own, anchorless and void of power.
You were right. It would have been much the wiser to simply allow the mortals their chance. But instead... this. So much for the Wisdom of the Dread Wolf.
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We live and we learn.
[ Trite. Dry. Typically he cherishes any rare occasion when Solas tells him he was right about something; this time, not so much.
Felassan had never entirely decided that the Veil shouldn't fall. He'd decided he wouldn't take the eluvians from Briala; he'd decided she deserved a chance to fight for her people. Their people. He'd decided they weren't weak, diseased things who should be glad to see their miserable era end, even if it ended in blood and chaos, but people who could and should be allowed to choose their own way.
He tries to imagine it now. Just waiting, after all, probably no more than another thousand years. Watching the Veil fray and dissolve, as destructive as a wildfire and as little anyone's fault — save Elgar'nan's, perhaps, if his death could only come by choice in the end, alone in the Black City with no one left to command. Would he have been sorry? Sorrier than he is now, every time he looks at Beleth and Solas in what should be the blackest dark and sees their sleeping faces cast green by the glow of that damned anchor?
Hard to say. ]
We might have warned them it was coming and given them time to prepare. We still could, if we find a way. If there is nothing but you it could be tied to.
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Who is to say? I have never been Elgar'nan's equal for sheer power.
[No one has. That was the benefit of being the first and the most ruthless; so much of what he became was fueled by blood and death and the willingness to take whatever course of action he needed, in order to dominate those around him. Elgar'nan had no mother, but if such a woman had ever been, he would have eaten her.]
Perhaps one Elvhen life alone cannot hold up the veil at all, not for long. I will endeavor to give you the opportunity to find out... [He did not miss the lack of an answer, Felassan. He will not chain you to his side, if you wish to go. But he will mourn afresh.] ...If you are willing to be dragged back into Thedas on my behalf, as I have said.
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[ Cheerful, but still something real beneath it. There was a time he wanted to be better than that. A ship that sailed long before now, really. The best anyone can hope is that it might someday be called back to port. ]
Would it have drowned the world in demons?
[ Perhaps Solas is tired of answering the question. But Felassan asks it with as much concern for the demons — the spirits — as for the mortals, at least. He doesn't need to tell Solas: it is a difficult and startling thing, for the metaphysics of the world you inhabit to be suddenly changed. It was no different in reverse, when the Veil fell. A great expanse. A trembling terror. This new void in us that ceases the spirit and makes us suddenly meat. ]
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Banal Nadas. In Minrathous, certainly, and other such places, so steeped and founded upon misery the loss of the veil would bring many spirits of pride, rage, and despair which already press upon the veil. But I believe most places, and most people, would survive.
The effects would be most profound at the ritual site itself. Erecting the Veil took enormous energy, more than I had even anticipated, and therfore logically, taking it back down again would shed much of that energy. It is likely that the resulting—
[He stops, abruptly, recognizing that he has gone a step too far, so engrossed in imagining the technicalities of it, the fine-tuned intermingling of tone-layers and self-reinforced balances, all cascading away from one another, melting down and out to vent away the hated veil and its stubborn division. Solas had forgotten that the implications... Ah, but he's already paused too long. It is too late to hide the truth.]
...The resulting explosion would have a significant radius.
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Of course.
[ It makes sense. There was no small amount of damage at the site of the Veil's creation. Felassan became quite intimately familiar with the rubble, searching it as he did for any sign, any scrap. ]
And you planned to survive that by...?
[ He doesn't need to hear the answer. No answer would also be an answer. There's a rustling sound, on his end of their connection. The brittle leaves beneath him as he shifts out of his comfortable recline against a tree for the first time since this conversation began. ]
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I did not.
[The pause now is less significant.]
Of course I had... ideas. Contingencies. Inventions. Like so much of Arlathan, I am a holdover from a time long-dead. I have no wish to die alone, but—
[The orb would originally have served as a buffer, a way to absorb many of the energies, and offer Solas a greater chance at survival, but the orb was in shattered bits in a box in the Lighthouse, unless Rook had thrown it out for the worthless junk it appeared to be... And the dagger had no such capabilities, by comparison.]
The reality was that nothing I could build in so little time would be able to withstand a tenth of the potential force.
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But Felassan is Felassan, so the impulse instead manifests as only a brief, foreboding pause before he says, with perfect calm, ]
I see. Are you at home?
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I am in the library.
[He is in trouble.]
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Stay there.
[ He has not forgotten the last terrible months of the rebellion, when Solas evaded Felassan’s every attempt to talk about a different dangerous plan.
This one, at least, Solas has already been talked out of. There’s little reason to hurry, but he does. And there’s little reason to be angry — it didn’t happen, it won’t happen, and who is Felassan to be cross with anyone else for walking open-eyed into an avoidable death? Little reason, but he is anyway, the whole time he’s flying, and when he drops to land and folds outward into elf in the same motion so he hardly has to stop moving, and when he crosses the threshold and sees Solas standing at the window and strides over with high, cold winter air still hanging around him, turning Solas by the shoulders so they face one another with the sort of grip that suggests a prelude to a dressing-down.
It isn’t the fight that goes out of him then, exactly, seeing Solas’s face up close. But the words do. He’s still for a moment, and then his firm, fierce hold on Solas’s shoulders moves to a firm, fierce grip on either side of his face, to pull him down —
Not to kiss. An older instinct than that, pressing forehead to forehead and nose to nose, urgently, and then just as urgently winding his arms around to pull Solas’s face into his neck. ]
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The violence in Felassan's love is irrefutable; that it is love, no less so.]
Ir abelas. [His voice is quiet, muffled against Felassan's shoulder.] Ir abelas.
[And perhaps that is his great failing: that he is a coward at heart, and knows it, and can do nothing more than to beg forgiveness and cling like a child.]
I could not let her die, when I might save her. I could not kill her too, and save myself instead.
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But he thinks: Solas would have done the same to Beleth. He'd learned nothing. He would have listened to no one, let alone asked for help or ideas. He'd have brought a tidal wave of magic down onto them, just as he'd once pulled it out like a warning tide. He'd have left her in the wreckage without regard for what she thought or what she wanted.
And died. He'd have died.
Felassan can seethe about that. He holds Solas to him with his jaw clenched and his fingers digging in too hard, impervious to apologies. Less impervious to the explanation. He shakes his head, a tight jerk of a motion, like it doesn't matter and he doesn't want to hear it, but he hears it anyway. Against his will it seeps in and softens his grip. ]
Be quiet.
[ It's gentler, though, than his hands had been. ]
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Except her. Except her violet eyes and the spray of freckles, and the way she tilted her head and smirked when she teased him, the way she could never bear to kiss him less than twice. All the loving ways that he did not deserve. At the end of it, faced with the reality of his Veil, his Great Mistake, killing her too... he had balked. And she had bent down and forgiven him, and begged him to let it go, to let her die under the pressure of entropy's cruel hands and then—
—and then she had, like some strange, impossible reward, demanded to come with him, to step into the Fade and the future both. And now they would have time.
Solas' hands come up, fists clenched in Felassan's shirt, and he thinks he should weep, but the tears will not come. There is only relief, and the sobbing breaths of air which could mean anything: laughter and grief intermingled.]
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— no, he is not so dramatic as that. Not consciously. But he does hold onto him for a length of time that would hold a noisier, wetter expression of his anger and heartache, if he did that. If he'd ever done that. ]
You can't.
[ Solas is gripping him, and shaking with his heavy breaths. Felassan doesn't do any squirming or pulling to encourage him to stop, to disentangle and look him in the eye, but he does relax his iron hold on him, now, finally, until it's just one hand resting on his shoulder, one thumb rubbing his scalp, and he would find no resistance if he stepped away. ]
You can't leave her that way. Whatever happens, whatever unforeseen shit is waiting past the horizon, however sure you are that it is the only way. If you have time to plan, you have time to tell her.
[ He would ask it for himself as well — but for Beleth, he thinks Solas might promise. ]
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[Solas really does laugh then, pained and weak and honest. He does not step away, but he too eases back a hair, raising his head ever-so-slightly, so that he may speak the truth between them, like a secret.]
I had attempted to leave her many times. To convince her to find another— hoped she would find a kinder home for her heart. She deserves better. [He suspects that he will spend all his life learning, striving to be that better man.] But she was with me, when Elgar'nan fell, and has made it very clear that whatever happened afterwards, whatever I did, she would be with me.
[Which is... terrible, every bit as much as it is a poignant tether on his heart. How could he tear it all down and die in the cleansing conflagration, if she would die too? He had thought her embroiled in the South's chaos, well-distant and lost to him. Coming to him there and then, at the key moment, had been a masterful stroke, and so very like her.]
If we were in a contest of wit and trickery, she defeated me beyond any possible doubt. This chain... it is her compromise— her choice. No ally would accept me unbound; even the kindest among them wished a far harsher punishment, in answer for my part in the fall of Arlathan, against the Titans, not merely to preserve the Veil. [Harding had been... particularly unpleasant to bear. They had been friends once, and once she knew he was the Dread Wolf, had seen his memories, his regrets... Those crimes were all he became to her. To any of them. Except for Beleth.] She convinced me. I went willingly into these bonds, trusting her judgement, and I will not leave her again, so long as she lives.
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There is something just about it. Of course. Felassan worries what it makes him, to think mortality is not to bad for other people while he harbors hopes of being brought home from death. What would it make Solas, in turn, if he had been willing to kill so many to tear down the Veil, but not to die? The monster they imagined him. Felassan can see that. But he can’t feel it. He can only feel…
He’s turned his head, found enough space to trail the tip of his nose against the line of Solas’s cheekbone. The beginning of something softer and sorrier, threaded with secondhand loneliness, borrowed from his imagined vision of Solas at the top of his tower again, sequestered with his diagrams and plans, the Lighthouse emptier and more silent than Felassan ever saw it.
But he feels something else, too. Soft steps and someone behind, with that combination of subtle signs from every sense that sometimes feels like an extra one. He doesn’t let go of Solas’s shoulder, but he hinges away, opening the space between them like a book so they can both see her. ]
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(She could refuse him. But she won't.)
But once the task is done, and Felassan still hasn't dropped in, she goes to see what he and Solas are up to, and, perhaps, see if they wouldn't mind another hand (or anything else) for it. But when she hears her name come up, she freezes just outside the door. Unworthy, perhaps, but... well. No one, even the Herald of Andraste herself, is perfect, is she?
But she does have to enter now, before her lingering goes from innocent to straight up nosy -- and even if she didn't care, she had her own thoughts to share. ]
If there had been a path that led to your freedom wholly, I would have gladly taken it. But... I had little power to sway things in my favor, aside from my pleas. [ And she'd had to. She still remembers that dark room, full of strangers and enemies to Solas, begging them to empathy. Morrigan, the woman who had stood next to her for years, also unsure. ] Maybe one day, when tempers are cooler, when injuries are faded scars, we can reconvene.
[ She steps up to them, resting one hand on Felassan's waist, and the other reaching for the hand that bore the weight that she'd carried, once. ]
And furthermore, I rather think I've decided what I deserve, and it's this. [ Felassan to one side, pressed against Solas, and he on the other. It's true that she could have lived a simpler life, with a different man, a quiet life of little complaint. But hadn't she already escaped that peaceful mediocrity once? ] I'm not sure how the conversation came about, but I will tell you this much -- we will figure things out, together. Even this. [ She squeezes his scarred hand, and reaches up to give them both a kiss on the nose. ] That, I think, is what I deserve.
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Felassan wishes to see me freed. [It's as good an explanation as any, as to how the conversation came about.] I'm not certain it is wise, or even possible; but it seemed necessary that I at least absolve you of any fault in tying me to the Veil. As you said: if there was a better path, one they would have accepted, you would have given it.
[Solas does not believe in gods, and has precious little confidence in men, but if he carries any kernel of real faith in him, it in her promise to him, to protect him. Whatever it takes.
He accepts his own kiss with soft eyes and a tiny smile.]
And so, you have this. Deserving, or otherwise.
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Ar-melana dirthavaren, revas vir-anaris.
[ It comes out a little sing-song, even for elvhen, like it's a skipping rhyme for children instead of the only oath he's ever freely and sincerely taken. He continues in the old tongue: ]
I would see you free as well, before I'll rest.
[ They have not discussed the well. Perhaps this isn't the time to start. But it is important to have on the record, at least. ]
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I agree with Felassan. I think we could build a convincing case, when that day comes to reconvene, to free you. You have no dragon to stop your death as the others did -- I'm sure people will see reason, if they wish the Veil to remain, to not have it hinge on a single elf. And if they don't want the Veil...
[ She shrugs. Done and dusted, in that case. She turns to Felassan -- allowing his manhandling of her curl without complaint -- with a look of temporary confusion. Her as well -- ? She'd already freed herself -- ah.
The whispers rise up, when she focuses on them. They do not sound particularly approving, so she bids them rest again.
And so she reaches to lean against Felassan reassuringly, as much as she can, when she's already so intertwined with them. ]
I think the Veil is a more pressing matter than yet another fragment of Mythal crawling out of someone's back pocket to start barking orders at me. Morrigan surely would know, if anyone did, and I assure you that she can't boss me around. You needn't let it press on your mind. There are other concerns to consider.
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[Yes, and what if Rook's grandchildren wish to reverse what their ancestor had fought to secure? Solas wonders. But it would take a great toll to divide the Veil from him now, spirit, blood, and flesh... And still, he is not sure it is wise to try. But there is time.]
If even a sliver of her yet remains, I cannot permit it to hold any power over you. Morrigan is fortunate that she retains memory alone, and no part of that conscious mind, else she would present a threat. Though she is your friend, she is ruthless, and I—
[He reaches across the small distance between them, and with one arm still around Felassan, still touching her own from wrist to elbow where it's wound around them both, Solas gently cups her cheek, letting his thumb brush there where ink once lay. He remembers them, those pale green whorls, the smoky hearth of Sylais' house artistically rendered, marking Beleth with proprietary force. He had grown used to it, and loved her face even then, but to see her made free... He is grateful.]
I knew what it was, once, to be held by that power. Nothing is worth the risk to you. Not for me.
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And here, the other side of the coin: a more-than-ally against Beleth's minimization of herself. Felassan doesn't begin to stir to argue with her himself. His eyebrows quirk the second before Solas begins to speak in an expectant sort of expression, like someone waiting for the twist in a story they already know, which shift into something almost smug, like see there, when the expected lines arrive on schedule. This, too, is fixed.
Though the mention of what Solas knows of being bound by Mythal does shrink his smile down to a whisper of itself and tighten his fingers on Solas's shoulder for a moment. Whatever is left of her, Felassan would like to kill himself. For both of their sakes. Perhaps even a little for his own.
But like all things, it will have to be done in whatever way it can be done, not whatever way one might dream. ]