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Violetta's first clue that something is off is that she awakens standing.
Her second, third, and fourth clues come in quick succession when she opens her eyes—the world is gray, it's breaking apart, and there's chunks of stone floating in the air. At that point, it's pretty clear that something isn't off so much as everything is.
Even if she wasn't already certain of that, the fifth and final clue comes in the form of a voice. "You have no idea what you have done."
"Solas," she realizes.
It's all coming back to her now. The ritual. Varric trying to talk him down. Taking Neve and making a mad dash for the pillar. Making it all come crashing down. It goes fuzzy from there, but there's blood, and chaos, and Varric hurt. And now she's here, but how?
Violetta turns with a gasp at the sound of footfalls, of danger. Normally, it means someone's approaching her hiding spot, and she needs to move. But this time, her eyes land on Solas, and she stands her ground.
"I know exactly what I've done," she snaps. "I stopped you from destroying the world."
"I was not destroying the world!"
Out of nowhere, she's yanked back with the ground beneath her feet, a bottomless ravine opening between the two of them. "When you disrupted my ritual, the magical energies pulled me here, into the Fade."
The Fade? That would explain the dreamlike quality of this whole thing. "But how did I get here?" Violetta presses. If they'd both been pulled in, he'd probably have said so. So what is she doing here?
"You are not," he answers. "Not physically. You are unconscious. You shed a few drops of blood at the ritual site, enough for a tenuous connection between us."
Her breath catches. "Blood magic?" That's one thing that has always set her on edge. She doesn't like anything that could mess with her head.
Solas gets even angrier at that. "Firstly, I abhor the use of blood magic. Secondly, had I the power to control you, I would already have used it."
Violetta isn't sure she believes that. Plenty of people hide away their strongest weapon until the right moment. But he's not controlling her right now, that's for certain. "Alright." She steps closer to him. "Enlighten me, then. Just what have I done?"
"You have freed the Evanuris," he snaps. "The 'elven gods,' as you would call them. Those were the creatures that escaped. They ruled Elvhenan, but that was not enough. They sought not just to be obeyed, but to be worshipped. When I rebelled, they drew on the horrific magic of the blight, corrupting all they saw until I trapped them." Four purple eyes meet as he fixes her with his gaze. "Thanks to you, though, I am now trapped, and these blighted 'elven gods' walk free."
She doesn't believe this for a second. "Right," she scoffs. "You were doing nothing wrong, I just happened to come by and ruin everything for no good reason. There was certainly no world-ending ritual for me to interrupt."
"The prison in which I had trapped them had begun to crumble," Solas insists. "I was moving them to another—"
"Oh, so you weren't tearing down the Veil and drowning the world in wild magic and demons? Could've fooled me."
He's silent for a moment. "I had a plan."
"Maker's breath." Violetta shakes her head. "You know, Varric always said you'd have a big explanation for why none of this was your fault."
For a heartbeat, there's something in Solas' expression, but it's gone before she can identify it. "Varric."
"Yeah. He said that's your style." Solas begins to pace, but Violetta doesn't care. "Never quite lies, right? Just clever half-truths that let you convince yourself you're doing the right thing. But he tried to talk to you anyway." She'd tried to discourage him, because looking around at the destruction that had already been wrought, it seemed obvious that this wouldn't be resolved through words. But when Varric Tethras sets his mind to something, hardly anything or anyone can sway him. "And now he's hurt."
"Varric is—" He stops short, and his eyes narrow. "Quite practiced at shading the truth himself."
Whatever. She doesn't give a damn what the Dread Wolf thinks about Varric. (She's known him six months, but it feels like he's always been there.) She changes the subject. "Those...things that got out. You said they were gods?"
The ground crumbles under her, and she barely manages to keep her footing on what remains. Solas looms over her now. "They said they were gods," he corrects, turning away from her. "Blighted, tyrannical, sadistic gods. It took all my power to imprison them millennia ago."
Violetta's blood boils. "Vaffanculo!" she spits. "It was your ritual that let them loose to begin with! You don't get to just sit back and look smug!"
"What else could I possibly do?" he asks, soft but harsh. "I do not have my ritual dagger. I do not have the network of eluvians that took me from the Lighthouse across the world. I have nothing, as the gods threaten this world again, all because you disrupted my ritual!"
Her dream self is unarmed, or she would throw a knife or five at him. It probably wouldn't do anything, but she'd feel better. "You mean when I stopped you from covering the world with demons?"
"You will soon see what I was trying to prevent," he tells her, contempt and venom dripping from his words. "Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are your problem to solve. This is your responsibility now."
The world goes black.
"Why? Why tear down the Veil?"
"You need to listen!"
"Do you want me to take the shot?"
"No. No! No!"
"You have no idea what you have done."
"This is your responsibility now."
Violetta doesn't quite realize she's awake until she's sitting up, heart pounding, with a white-knuckled grip on the edge of her cot.
"Well. Look who's still with us." Varric grins at her from another cot.
"Varric! You're okay! Thank the Maker." Distantly, she wonders if that's still appropriate to say, given the current situation, but she's not religious enough to care. "I saw Solas stab you, and I wasn't sure..."
"Trust me, kid, I've had worse. Gonna take more than a flesh wound to stop me." He coughs. "Don't think I'll be making it out to the field anytime soon, though."
Violetta takes a shaky breath, trying to get her heart rate under control. "Varric, what happened out there?"
"Well, Rook, it turns out you were right when you said Chuckles wasn't going to listen."
And she wishes she hadn't been. "The plan went more than a bit awry," she remarks. "Viago won't be pleased to hear I failed this contract."
She hopes Viago's okay. She hasn't heard from him in six months, not since he wrote back to her telling him what she would be doing. Treviso is a dangerous place with the Antaam around—but the Crows are dangerous, too.
"I'm sure he'll find it in his heart to forgive you. Harding got everyone out, at least—by the skin of her teeth. And before you start worrying," way too late for that, "Neve will be fine. Looks like she's a lot tougher than both of us put together. Or at least than me."
Varric's out of commission, Neve's hurt, there are apparently gods on the loose...and it all comes back to her. "I'm sorry. I should've come up with a better plan. I should've..." Should've been different. Should've been better. Should've been someone else.
"Hey, you worked with what you had," Varric assures her. "And you succeeded, for whatever that's worth. World isn't drowning in demons."
"But that might change," Violetta insists. "We trapped Solas in the Fade, but something else got out. Something that might be worse."
"Rook, you've got this," he insists. "I know it. I've known since the night you rescued me. There's a reason I dragged you into this whole Solas mess—you're clever, you're adaptable, and you don't know when to quit."
The Crows would say that differently. Harebrained, and inconsistent, and stubborn. It feels nice to hear it this way.
"Rook! Look who's awake."
(She still doesn't know how that nickname stuck.)
Neve steps into the room, bruises on her face that make Violetta wince. "I've been searching the place for lyrium potions. Didn't mean to intrude."
"Not at all." She gets to her feet, muscles protesting. "I was just about to have a look around, anyway."
"Oh, be careful if you go outside," Neve warns. "It is a long way down. The eluvian led us into...something. I don't know what this place is, but we're in the Fade."
The Fade? Again? But then why does this feel so...real? Why is this any different from her dreams? "Well, then I'll definitely be having a look around."
"Can't hurt." She pauses. "In theory. We need to talk about our next move, though, and soon. Maybe find Harding—she went outside somewhere. There's a table in the central area that'd make a good meeting spot."
Violetta nods. You always need a rendezvous point. She looks back at Varric. "Go ahead, Rook." He rolls onto his side. "Me, I need to sleep."
She hopes he'll be okay. For a heartbeat, she wants to ask Neve exactly what his injuries are, but a surge of doubt stops her. What more is there to know, really? He's here, he's alive, and he won't be helping them further. What difference do the details make? Don't ask questions you should know the answer to, volantona. So she stays silent, and Neve leaves.
"See you later, kid."
Wherever they've landed, it's in remarkably good condition, yet Violetta somehow knows it hasn't been touched in centuries.
Maybe it's the remnants of artwork on the walls. Maybe it's the architecture, so unlike anything she's ever seen. Or maybe it's the unnerving, unshakable sensation that she's treading through a veritable graveyard with each cautious, silent step.
A tablet, written by someone called Felassan, calls it the Lighthouse, same as Solas did in the dream. It was his base of operations when he rebelled against the Evanuris millennia ago. Hopefully it'll work twice. You are safe here, both those of flesh and those of Fade. Hopefully that's true.
The outer structure is run-down, the crumbled remnants of parts of it strewn about, but Violetta's never seen anything more majestic. "Maker's breath," she utters, looking around.
They're floating. The Lighthouse is on a platform floating in midair, with branches and staircases connecting it to other platforms. By all accounts, they should be plummeting to a ground that likely doesn't exist, but they're not.
The Fade is really fucking weird.
In the center, of course, stands a large wolf statue. In case anyone forgot that this was the Dread Wolf's territory.
Approaching the statue, Violetta sees a short, redheaded figure. Harding. "Rook," the dwarf greets her. "You're awake. And we're..."
"In the Fade," she finishes. "Neve thought we should talk. About what to do next."
"We should," Harding agrees. "But maybe we ought to look around a little, too. We might be here a while."
Yeah. Violetta thinks she'd like to get a sense of just what they've walked into.
After she comes across the third hallway blocked off by a tangle of branches, Violetta comes to the conclusion that the Lighthouse just doesn't want her to see all of it yet.
This is the Fade. Plants don't grow naturally. For parts of the Lighthouse to be inaccessible, something or someone must be deliberately stopping her from reaching them. And Violetta's no stranger to that, but normally, a barrier comes in the form of a wall she can scale or a lock she can pick. That's not the case here, and there isn't time for her to figure out how to bypass this. So she'll have to leave it to be figured out another day.
Once she's accepted this failure, she switches gears to checking in with the others. It'd be good to get a sense of how they're holding up.
Violetta finds Neve in one of the little side buildings, with big windows and numerous blue lights floating around. In lieu of a greeting, she looks at the lights and raises her eyebrows.
"Wisps," Neve explains, her false leg clinking against the floor as she moves to sit on the desk. "Figures they're in the Fade, but I swear they're following me."
Maker, those bruises do not look pleasant. "You all right?"
"Strange place we've fallen into, but I'll work with it. You know me."
Except, well. "Do I?"
"As much as I know you," Neve says simply. "I know Varric wanted you for the job. You know the same about me."
That's virtually nothing. She knows nothing about this woman, and already she's fucked things up. Doesn't that change things? "We just met, and I made a call that got you injured."
"I'll be fine," she insists. "You trusted me for the job, and I delivered. That's what counts. If we're stuck in this, let's hope you can trust me again."
"This isn't about whether I trust you or not," Violetta protests. "Of course I do. But I'm sorry you got hurt because of my call—and, well, what if it had been worse? Or it's worse in the future?"
Neve shrugs. "I don't know. That's the raw deal we get."
"Yeah." She hates everything about this topic, and she doesn't know why. It's scrapes and bruises. They've both had worse, and they'll both have worse again. Maybe it's just the everything else of it all. She wants to talk about something else. "You take a lot of notes. What about?"
"Depends on the case. Right now, it's about what we know—or at least, what we knew before Solas changed the game."
"Oh? So what do we know?"
"Not much," Neve admits. "I'm sure Lace would hate to hear that, but...one step at a time."
"Well, I've got step one," Violetta offers. "Figure out what we're chasing."
"Right. And the twenty other questions that need answers?"
"Step two, obviously. See, we're making progress."
Neve chuckles, and something loosens in Violetta's chest. "I can see why Varric brought you on."
That makes one of us, Violetta doesn't say.
"It wasn't supposed to go this way. What do we do now? What do we do?"
Harding's breathing is shaky, near-tears, if not already there, and Violetta wants nothing more than to vanish out of the room before she's noticed. Leave her to her emotions—Maker knows she can't help with them. But for some reason, she steps closer instead. "Harding?"
"Oh! Hey, Rook." She seems to steady herself, getting to her feet and facing her. "How's it going?"
"I should be asking you that." Why is she doing this? Why is she delving into someone else's feelings as if she can do anything about it? "Are you...doing all right?"
"I don't know," she admits. "Are you? Is anyone? Anyway, it doesn't matter how I'm doing. What are we going to do about this mess? We were going to go back through the eluvian, right? So let's start with that, as soon as we can."
"Of course," Violetta agrees. "The mission comes first. But you can still take a moment to—"
"Now you sound like Varric," Harding interrupts. "He and I started this, and I can't stop. Not now. So don't ask me to."
Talk to him, Violetta wants to urge her. He'll set you straight. But she's known Varric six months, and Harding's known him a decade. Who is she to claim to know him better? Besides, no doubt she's already talked to him. He was already conscious when Violetta woke up, and knowing Lace, she'd come to see him as soon as possible. So if he disagreed, he'd have said that, so she says nothing.
"Just come get me when you're ready to go, all right?"
All Violetta can do is nod.
"So." Neve's voice is heavy. "We stopped the ritual."
"And Varric paid the price," Harding says.
"Varric knew the risks of trying to talk to Solas," Violetta points out. "We all did. He made his choice."
It's not like she can fault him for making a bad decision—that'd be damn hypocritical of her. She doesn't know why she says it, really. It just feels like the right thing to say in the moment.
Harding looks surprised, then shakes her head. "And now Solas is...gone. And we're here, wherever here is, besides being somewhere in the Fade."
"Solas called it the Lighthouse," Violetta offers.
Neve's brows lift. "He did? When?"
Ah. Right. She's neglected to mention that part. "In my head," she explains. "While I was unconscious, he was there, and let me tell you, he's quite displeased with us interfering with his ritual."
"Good," Harding spits.
"Not to mention that he's trapped in some kind of Fade prison," she continues. "Hard to say which one he was angrier about."
"You're sure that wasn't just a dream?" Neve asks. "It'd be a reasonable one to have."
"Solas can speak with people in their dreams," Harding says. "Even kill them."
Violetta blanches. "Then I suppose I got lucky that all he did was lecture me. Apparently I bled a bit onto the ritual site, which is now allowing him to gripe at me. Hopefully, it isn't enough that he can make my head explode."
"So Solas is using blood magic," Neve concludes. “Like any normal mage would to play with your mind."
"But he's not a normal mage," Harding insists. "Like I told you, he's an elven god."
"Putting together a nice ritual doesn't make him a god."
"It doesn't matter if he's literally a god or not," Violetta scoffs. "In terms of his power against ours, he may as well be."
"All right," Neve concedes. "Well, we've stopped the ritual, and there doesn't seem to be an immediate danger. For now. You're certain Solas can't use blood magic to affect your mind?"
"That doesn't matter right now. We're not out of danger."
"What do you mean?" Harding asks.
"Those things that escaped," Violetta starts. "They were—Solas had two of the elven gods imprisoned. They escaped when we disrupted the ritual. He called them Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain." Any other elf would have heard the names before, would probably know more, but they don't have any other elf, just her. "They were two of the gods Solas rebelled against, back in ancient Elvhenan." A time she used to dream of, when reality was too painful. Stupid. "When I talked with Solas, he was scared of them. He called them horrific tyrants."
"Tyrants so powerful elven history remembers them as gods," Harding muses.
"Yeah. He says they drew on the blight for power, and it corrupted them. That was when he sealed them away. And we just let them loose."
"So instead of one...god running around, we have two," Neve says. "And they're not just powerful, they're blighted."
"We need to get out there and stop them," Harding insists.
Neve looks at her. "Just like that? We're down a man, without Varric. We can't just rush in."
"I know you're hurt, Neve, but the rest of us need to do something."
"I'll be ready to fight when it's time. But we need to investigate, then figure out what we're dealing with."
"And how many more people will get hurt—get killed—while we spend time investigating?"
"We spent six months tracking Solas down," Violetta points out. "And Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are worse than him. When I have a contract, I don't rush in blind. I gather information first." Except for when there's Antaam occupiers who need killing, of course, but that's neither here nor there. "We need to know what we're dealing with, what our targets are capable of, before we go after them."
"But we only have Solas' word about all of this," Harding argues.
"That's just more reason to do our own investigating," she counters. "We figure out just who and what our targets are, and then we take our shot."
"Fine," Harding relents. "The eluvian led us here, instead of back to Minrathous."
"Let's hope it goes back to the ritual site," Neve says. "There's always clues to be found at the scene of the crime."
It's not just her face that's bruised, Violetta notices—there's a dark splotch on her chest, and on her wrist, and probably more she can't see. "Neve, are you okay to go?"
"It's a headache," Neve assures her. "I've worked with worse."
"Understood." She has, too. "Let's get back to the ritual site, then."
Hopefully they find something there. Viago will kill her if she can't fix this.