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If there is to be any hope at all, he must seal the Breach.
His heart breaks for every kind spirit wrenched through the rifts, and he pities the mortals that hurry to their deaths with every new assault. The guilt is his alone, a constant companion, but it is also a distraction he cannot afford. These people are shadows on a wall. And so he watches the world as through dim glass, forces himself to stay at a steady distance, to be an observer, and to not invest himself.
The prisoner is dying. His magic is consuming her, and it is all he can do in his weak state to slow the process. He cannot allow himself guilt for this, either—it is a regrettable thing, her pain, but he has more pressing regrets. The lines on her face are bitter reminders of his failure, and so he avoids looking at them. She cries and babbles in her sleep, her agony clear and immediate, staring him in the face, but he pushes it down, detaches himself, lets himself look only at her hand and the terrible puzzle it poses.
He cannot stay awake forever, though, and so he grudgingly allows Haven’s herbalist to stand vigil for a few hours, knowing full well that his poultices and smelling salts are futile. He retires to his shack. It's a spare, efficient, and ragged thing the Seeker procured for him after deciding to delay his execution. He cannot summon the energy for amusement at her threats.
He ignites a fire in the hearth with a gesture and shrugs off his cloak, sitting and warming his hands and feet by the flames, a sigh of relief escaping his lips. The demands of his physical body are still unfamiliar and often overwhelming. For so long he has felt only through the haze of memories in the Fade, and he had forgotten the sharp sting of real cold.
He throws a sprig of embrium on the fire and the sweet, smoky scent wafts throughout the room. He closes his eyes and inhales.
For a moment, the world is righted. He is back where he should be, with people who are real and who understand, people who do not call him a madman for his choice of friends or an apostate for what is as natural to him as breathing. Out his window is not snow and death but an eternity of spring winds and the quiet songs of slow magic. Beyond his door is not a makeshift infirmary but the sapphire blue lake of his sanctuary, crystalline and perfect, surrounded by verdant trees and fauna long forgotten.
For a moment, he is home.
Soon, too soon, the fire burns down and the illusion is gone. He opens his eyes to only ashes.
Awake and alone, he buries his head in his hands and weeps.
The rotunda is quiet at night. The library’s usual denizens are long asleep, and in the dark hours before dawn the only sound is the soft shuffling of feathers high above him. The candle on his desk is the only light, casting long, flickering shadows across the painted walls.
The quiet usually brings him serenity, but tonight it presses on him, weighs him down, makes his breath quicken and his heart race. His ears ring with it. It is a hollow mockery of his mind’s inability to silence itself. He has always prided himself on his mind; on his composure; on, at least, his ability to appear composed; but all that has shattered into nothing, now.
He is meant to be studying the shard on his desk. It is a perplexing mystery to the Inquisition’s researchers, and one he has no desire to solve for them, so he will play at investigating. He will read the right books and express the right frustrations. It is a good excuse as any to be awake, tonight, if someone chances upon him.
Sleep, once his dearest friend, eludes him lately, night after night, and finds him only when he pushes his body to exhaustion, his eyes drooping shut and shoulders slumping. He is not quite there, tonight, not yet, and so his mind races on, and on.
He had dismissed her so easily, at the start. A Dalish as ignorant and defensive as any of them. And yet she had peeled away his defenses as if born to it, quick and efficient as dressing a deer. He had been surprised at first by her curiosity and intelligence. And then by her swift loyalty, her wisdom, her optimism, her compassion. She was the first person since waking to look at him and see more than an apostate to be feared and used. He spilled secrets of history and magic to her almost without thinking, delighted to be able to speak freely, and found her his equal in many things.
He ignored his aching heart after Haven’s fall. He ignored the swell of joy in his chest when she returned. He ignored the way light shone in her hair and the way her lips curved into slow smiles. He ignored the way her eyes followed him in a crowded room. He ignored the way he held his hands behind his back to keep from reaching for her. He ignored the thread of attachment that wove them closer, day after day, and told himself it would pass.
But he cannot ignore it any longer. When she kissed him in the Fade her lips were sweet and gentle, her hands so soft and tentative at his chest, at his arm. Her eyes held a question, one he answered with vigor, everything he had tried so dearly to suppress emerging in a passion that surprised both of them. It had been so long since he was touched with affection. But that was not the whole of it. He cannot not lie to himself on that account, at least. His heart would not pound at a touch from any other.
There are considerations, he said later, fear and guilt forcing him to a distance again. An understatement if there ever was one.
He thinks of the dark road he must walk, of the duty he cannot escape, of the horror that would surely be in her eyes at the truth of him.
And yet here, in this entropic world of lifelessness and decay, a world wholly alien to him, he has found someone who is fiercely, undeniably alive.
Somehow, this Dalish woman has become his anchor. The irony does not escape him.
She is real. He knows this, deep in his marrow.
But she cannot be real.
If she is real, then the surety of his purpose, of everything he has worked for, is thrown into chaos. If this world could make someone like her, then he must doubt himself, lest he be as monstrous as the enemy they fight.
Emotional compromise is a mistake, one he knows all too well. He cannot allow himself this. He cannot do this to her. He half hopes she will forget him, carry her affections to one more deserving. His other half burns at the thought.
Losing her would mean being truly alone, again. The specter of returning to that loneliness makes his eyes sting, bitter tears threatening to spill over, and he presses his palms hard against his face.
For him to even consider such an entanglement is madness. Sweet, intoxicating madness. Madness that stems the tide of this bleak world, this place where everything is lost and forgotten, where he is nothing but a broken anachronism.
He hears a sudden noise from the main hall and wipes at his eyes furiously, expecting humiliation, seeing with jarring clarity the picture he must make, crying alone by candlelight. He listens hard, minutes stretching by, but he hears no more. He is alone in the dark.
It is hours before the blessed relief of sleep claims him.
It is a mercy, he tells himself on the long walk back to Skyhold. He had been a fool to even consider telling her the truth, the vast horror of his lie. For surely that could be her only response. And if it was not—to lay his burdens at her feet would be inexcusable. Now that they are apart he can distance himself again, harden his heart, remember his duty, and she can do the same.
Ar lasa mala revas.
She is free.
He gives himself an hour. An hour to mourn, an hour to regret, an hour to curse himself, an hour to fear and hate what he must do.
Much later, when he passes through Skyhold’s gates again, his eyes have dried, and no one is the wiser.
He wanders the Fade, still, and he cannot help but pace around the outskirts of her dreams. Sometimes he wanders too close and she sees him, reaches for him, and he wakes with a start in a cold sweat, cursing his own cruelty and selfishness.
In the Fade she is whole, her body unbroken by his curse.
Often, though, it is his own dreams, his own memories, that he returns to. Once he found comfort in returning to the golden age of Arlathan, to walk the lighted paths and crystal spires lost to time. Now there is another memory, far more recent, that he returns to night after night after night.
She comes to him the night he returns from mourning Wisdom, in his tidy room off the battlements he uses mostly to store books.
Her smile is sad and lovely. She sits beside him on the bed and takes his hand in hers. He can only guess at his appearance—gaunt, no doubt, and pale, and likely red around the eyes. It should be embarrassing to be seen like this, especially by her, but there is only open affection and worry in her face.His hand tightens around hers, his gratitude bottomless. Lately, it is not her deep wisdom but her simple kindnesses that make his heart ache.
You don’t have to mourn alone, she had said. And yet though he yearns to, he cannot tell her all of what he mourns, for too often now, it is she he mourns.
He doesn’t feel the tears on his cheeks until she brushes them away with gentle fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and he almost laughs at the absurdity of it. Instead he leans against her, his body suddenly tired and heavy. Her arms folds around him, drawing him close, and she presses a chaste kiss to his temple.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he says, nearly calling her vhenan and knowing that is a line he cannot cross, not yet, though the truth of it rings in him like a bell. His voice is wobbling, rough, and his eyes are wet. He does not care.
They stay pressed together, quiet, and for those scant hours he is at peace. He inhales her scent—embrium and leather—and hears her slow heartbeat and quiet breaths. She is so warm. He forgets his guilt, his sorrow, his fear. With her by his side he feels as though he can surpass it, feels as though he can shed it all like an old cloak and stand beside her. He can embrace this world and all its failings, so long as she is there, her hand in his. It is contentment he has never felt, in this world or any other.
He dreams the memory again, and again. Sometimes, he does not even know why. Sometimes, he does. The details blur as years pass—was her hair up, or down? Was she wearing a red scarf, or was it blue?—but the vividness of that joy, however brief, never fades.
The Dread Wolf cannot afford these dreams, with the war he must wage.
Solas, who cannot help but dream, lets the seed of doubt grow in his heart. He watches and waits as the bloom unfurls, alone, amid the ashes.