Chapter Text
Sky blackened, hope for the future uncertain with the trembling dawn, and above this chaos: the archon's spire, covered in the entrails of Lusacan, the last Archdemon.
So much of that moment reminded her of the final push at the Valley of Sacred Ashes, of the last fight to save all of Thedas. But it was not a magister and his blighted dragon that awaited her at the end of the line, it was another monster altogether. The promise of an undoing, if not an everlasting promise seen through to the end.
“Bind yourself to the Veil,” Rook’s voice carried as clear as a bell. “…stop it from falling.”
Revas’ blood turned to ice, a gasp fighting its way out of her quivering lips.
This wasn’t how she’d imagined her future, crippled, heartbroken, beaten down from losing friend after friend to the blight in the South. She hadn’t expected to survive her encounter with Corypheus all those years ago, but she had always imagined hope would endure if she fell in that battle; hope that there would always be a promise of tomorrow.
There was none of that now.
She’d felt it when she walked the streets of Tevinter, seeing so many feet sway above the hanging post, nooses digging through skin. Cries of loss trickled from near every home and it was worse across the border. The Free Marches. The Dales. Denerim. There were no more roaming halla. The aravels were gone. Cities, older than she would ever be, were lost to the blighted growth of endless decay, lost to the sourness of rot and the heat of death. Skyhold remained. And the sick, the poor, the wounded, they all flocked to her walls. Last she was there, they had turned the rotunda into an infirmary. She’d watched as countless strangers and friends had erected a wall of remembrance over the frescoes. Drawings, letters marked with the names of loved ones, red hand prints, every creative indicator of loss was mounted on those walls, a candle lit by the feet each night.
She had hung up the letter from Briala a few months ago, the one that spoke of the loss of the Dalish clans and city alienages, the loss of what little elvish resistance had begun to rise in the face of human tyranny. She had cried when she’d added the title of Last of Clan Lavellan to her speeches, rallying the dwindling number of her troops to their death as they tried to save Grand Enchanter Fiona and her Circle mages, and then the Arl at Redcliff, and then the entire city of Halamshiral. Walking the palace she had once danced in, seeing barely a soul, hearing no music, it broke her.
The morning after each hard-fought battle, when she went to count the new dead amongst the half-living, she’d hear the curse she’d once foolishly cast on the very walls that stood as the final bastion against complete ruination.
I hope, wherever you are, 'ma vhen'an, that you are as miserable in your lonely hunt as I am miserable in this broken body, carrying the weight of two hearts. May the dinan’shiral break you, for that is the only way I could ever hope to see you again; or let this cruel world open its maw and swallow me whole, into nothing, past the Fade and out of memory so my sadness can never touch another again.
Regret. O, such a dagger, blunted and rough, pushing past bone to tear at your insides. She understood it better than she did joy. Because why else would the world try so hard to tear itself apart if not to answer her prayer?
Was his dinan’shiral not breaking them both?
A week ago, she had placed a Chantry necklace at the foot of a pile of jewellery recovered from the dead for Mother Giselle and Charter. And then the letter from Varric… she had carried it with her, through everything. Her last shred of hope.
I found him, Freckles.
She had cried as she held the paper in her hands, Dorian’s hand pressed to her back as Rook walked out to face the last of the Evanuris.
Revas should have been used to losing. All those lessons of Wicked Grace she’d had with Varric, all the sparring matches with Bull, the debates with Dorian, the arguments on Circle infrastructure with Vivienne, talk of belief in the Maker with Leliana, belief in elven gods… Crestwood. Losing should have been as easy as breathing, but every breath was a shard of glass to her lungs, a battering ram to her spirit.
There were no ties left to bind her to her home in Thedas.
There was but one choice to make.
Revas looked down at Elgar’nan’s body, disappointed at what rotten fruit the ides of godhood bore. There was always someone bent on breaking the world. Uncertain, she looked ahead, dismayed by just how much the tide had turned in a few months.
It cut her deeply, to know that it was her heart that stood at the helm of this unending cycle.
From where she stood, she could see the Veil gouged open like the slit of a tired eye; poised to waken, yet still full of the promise of further sleep. That same light had once shone from her very palm.
Despite everything, she found herself fighting off the pull of a smile. Herald of Andraste here to face the very Maker of the Veil. It was poetic enough to make a religion out of it. Varric would’ve made a killing with a twist like that. His best and last seller for all of Thedas. A love story.
She paused by the doorway, watching Solas ascend the steps slowly, unsure of what it was she was hoping to see, but when Solas bowed his head in that very same manner he had done before he bent to kiss her that last time, she knew the words that would fall from his lips before they even had a chance to grace the air.
He couldn’t do it.
Not on his own.
Thirteen steps. That was all she needed to surmount. Not a high dragon. Not a blighted, ancient Tevinter magister who had walked the Black City. Not the fall of the South. It was just thirteen steps across the divide, past Rook and past every decision that led them to this point.
Back turned to her, wrecked and ravaged by a hard fight, Solas’ body was wrapped beautifully in armour stripped down to its barebones, a remnant of the one she’d watched gleam through an eluvian, wolf pelt slung on the side in place of a sigil. It made him look vulnerable. Nowhere near as regal as he’d been in the Fade, yet neither draped in humility as he’d been in Skyhold.
When Solas climbed the final step, dagger balancing dangerously in his open palm, he declared full of regret: “I cannot.”
His voice, quivering and mournful, sent tremors through Revas.
She quickened her pace, half afraid she’d turn into a shemlen in the process.
He was so close. So close to touch. Her every muscle ached to reach out and be reunited with him, her chest heavy as though she could feel the very weight of him pressed against her bones. Yet, despite how much she desired it, she could not run to him. She had to take each step carefully.
Rook gave her a look of warning, but shifted to the side, letting her pass.
They would work together on this.
Revas would have her shot.
Until she wouldn’t.
The ground seemed to stretch farther with each step, creating even more distance the closer she got. The air, acrid with the smell of blight and blood, grew thick, electric in that habitual way the Fade had felt when it coursed through the anchor, when it bound her every fibre to a spark of light and used her very spirit as flint to cauterise the tears in the Veil all those years ago.
Three steps left.
She could practically feel what it was like to be beside him, to be near his magic.
They had once been like ice and thunder. Her, this brewing storm like the kind that kissed the horizon on the Storm Coast. Him, the kind of avalanching cold that could rival the fall of Haven.
Whenever she’d been close to him in battle, feeling the strength of his barriers, nearly impenetrable, she’d felt unstoppable. And at the mark of terrifying blizzards that’d turn the skin of any enemy brandishing a blade against her to glaciers, she’d feel so possessively loved.
That is what she had to hold onto. Not the pain or the betrayal or the losses. The love that was always there, slipping through the cracks, chipping away at his polite mask, bolstering her with the knowledge that she was not so easily avoided, no matter how hard he’d tried to steer clear of her.
Elfroot, ozone and poultices. The scent of an apostate. A teacher. She could smell him. So familiar. Soothing. Her balm in the cold nights.
Gods! Her hands were shaking.
Solas stared at the Veil, his back holding fast with purpose, his fingers twitching by the dagger's grip. He took a breath, and without looking back at Rook, he pressed on with his reasoning: “To stop now would be to dishonour those that I’ve wronged to come this far!”
Solas raised his hand, dagger’s edge close to his bleeding eye, and she knew not to wait any longer. This was it. The moment when she’d test how well she’d kept his heart.
Time went still. As if the universe itself had been a fabrication made to draw them together, archaic magic leant to a reunion of lost lovers. Solas' body went ridged as he turned to face her the moment she spoke, bewildered and uncertain.
“Even if those you’ve wronged asked you to stop?”
He looked so utterly broken, helpless in a way his body alone could not possibly convey. The years had lent him strength where her memory had remembered vulnerability... mortality. Revas watched in relief as she saw just how much of an effect her words had had on him.
Solas’ lips parted ever-so-slightly, his brow moving up a fraction, showing a hint of familiar awe—that surprise at having been affected so deeply by her. It was good to see that things didn’t change. And for a second, she imagined he’d smile. But then he bowed his head, snapping his eyes away from the heat of her gaze, turning away from her to to glance downward.
Shame.
He was ashamed.
In a solemn breath, one meant for reunited lovers, not opposing forces at the end of the world, he whispered her title; her name; her place in his story: “Vhen’an…”
That simple word was enough to knock the wind from her, but Revas would not give him the satisfaction of being backed into a corner by pain. Not like in Halamshiral. Not again.
Her heart quickened as she took another step forward, “You think you’ve gone too far to come back but you’re wrong. I am here,” she gestured to the desolation around them, beseeching, “walking the dinan’shiral with you!”
Slowly, he lowered his dagger, his temples burdened by the dawning of his actions, by the gravity of what she’d just said.
“I lied,” he urged, trying to draw on any nerve that might still be raw, unwilling to believe she truly meant the words she’d spoken. “I betrayed you.”
And what did that matter?
Through everything.
How could that matter when she was beginning to remember what it was like to be in his gaze, to hear the tremors in his voice, to feel the power of his yearning across those steps?
“I forgive you!” She felt her voice crack. “All you have to do is stop!”
Please, for me, my heart, stop.
Solas turned to face her completely, his head, once high, was brought low in reverence. Humbly, as was his way all those years ago, he bowed before her and her heart broke.
“Ir abelas, vhen’an, but I cannot.” His head rose up, his eyes hardening, replacing humility with purpose. “Long before we met, I failed my oldest friend. She died for my failure. If I leave the Veil in place, I am destroying the world she wanted. And I will have… She will have died for nothing.”
He turned back to the tear in the Veil, raised the dagger once more, and was halted by the cry of a raven—a creature Revas had once held sacred as a Keeper of Dirthamen’s Secrets.
Morrigan transformed before him, her entrances as memorable as always. She approached Solas with ease, speaking to him with the cadence of an old friend.
Revas took another step forward, mind focused on him. Always him. All she could do was push; pushing past the doubt that tried to claw up her spine when she witnessed him shrink with the realisation that he was not speaking to Morrigan entirely; pushing past the wrenching in her gut when she heard how torn he’d sounded as he’d spoken Mythal’s name; pushing past the anger as she learned of his corruption at her hands, past the devastation as she watched him crumble in the last light of forgiveness before Mythal vanished.
The petrifying sounds of his sobs sent her to her knees beside him, as he had knelt for her when she’d been wracked by pain when the anchor tried to rip its way out of her.
Finally, she would say the vows she had dreamed of saying.
“Banal nadas. Ar lath ma, vhen’an,” she could see him shake, hear him whimper, but it had been enough.
With a clenched fist, Solas resolved to stand tall, his hand ghosting the deep bruise near his forehead as he tried to control his sobs. With a steadying breath, he found the strength to turn to the Veil and do what must be done.
In the blink of an eye, he brought the lyrium dagger to his palm and sliced clean through, holding his fist up as he made his oath.
“My life force now sustains the Veil. With every breath I take, I will protect the innocent from my past failures. The Titans’ dreams are mad from their imprisonment. I cannot kill the blight, but I can help to soothe its anger.”
Solas placed the dagger in Rook’s hand, finally turning to Revas to say his goodbye, “I will go and seek atonement.”
Then he paused in front of the tear, and Revas was certain this was where her path would always end.
“But you do not have to go alone,” she walked up to him, hands outstretched.
There was that look again. Awe. Disbelief. Adoration. Hurt.
When next he spoke, he sounded so small, so mortal once again.
“Ar ghilas vir banal,” he shook his head, his eyes gleaming with tears that were barely being held at bay. The place he was to journey into was barren. Terrible. Burdened only by regrets. Yet his voice did not carry despair alone. It was soft. So unbelievably soft. Perhaps imbued with a desperation of some kind.
Whatever it was, Revas would not be talked out of this.
“Tel'banal ar ama,” she refuted his excuse. Nothing mattered. No matter how dire a place, how barren, they would be together.
Solas swallowed down another sob, except this one was half laughter. Because, of course she’d cast aside any fears he might have used to persuade her otherwise. His hand pressed down on hers, hopeful, full of need, and she complied.
As a child, she’d heard lovers exchange the vows of eternity during marriage ceremonies. Once, she’d dreamed of uttering them to him, when they’d been in the Inquisition. Sylaise enaste var aravel. Lama, ara las mir lath. Bellanaris. The words had sounded so beautiful. Inevitable, even. But knowing what she knew of the Old Gods, if she were to make a vow of forever, it would not be in Sylaise’s name. It would be in honour of the distances they’d spent apart. The journey.
“Vir shiral ma’lasa, bellanaris,” she sealed the vow with a kiss. Gentle, compassionate, tangled with relief. They had endured. As Var Bellanaris had, the burial grounds in the Dales, through war and occupation, an untouched beacon of old Arlathan. Bellanaris. Eternity, come what may. They had made the journey, and now all that remained was the love.
Solas deepened the kiss, wincing through it as he carefully moved his cut lip against hers, the taste of blood shared between them.
When they finally parted, they were one. Bound. Spirits entwined. And then they became the heartstone of the Fade. The place where Cole was from. The place where they had shared their first kiss. As Revas had made Skyhold a home, made Thedas a place worth living in, for however short a time, she knew Solas would do the same for her. A home for a home.
The Maker returned back to his beginnings, but he was neither alone, nor surrounded only by regret. He was with his bride. The Herald of Andraste. Inquisitor. Revasan Lavellan, the Last of Her Clan; a Paragon of Freedom.
Now all that needed to be done was face the regret.