Chapter Text
Candlelight glints off the knuckles of her hand; a small black cat pounces at the shimmer it sends onto the far wall. It misses and she watches its tail flick, swish, flick.
Another cat appears out of the darkened evening onto the opened window of Snow’s rented window. She doesn’t recall the name of the town she is in any longer; she lost track years ago.It stopped mattering longer ago than that.
Ma Vhen’an,
The letter begins as it always does.
I wonder now, as I do with every letter I send, whether you are truly lost to me. Compassion has offered time and time again to pass this back to you, although I think it is more wishful than truthful. Perhaps they believe if they hold my words, they will find you more easily.
That is the problem, is it not? That we wish to find you when you so desperately wish not to be found.
Ma lath, ma’sal’shiral - I wish only that you could truly trust me. I know the path you walk is a terrible one and one you believe that you alone must walk.
Have you ever considered that you might be wrong?
Mi’nas’sal’in.
A’lath,
Eir
The woman grows tired, both in hand and in heart, as her pale eyes dance with the candle flame over her precise words. She had been writing Solas - Fen’Harel - letters since not long after he abandoned her following Corypheus’ defeat. Those letters, she has long-since burned in the fireplace of her rooms in Skyhold. Chasing him down after traveling to Halamshiral had broken something in her anew. She doubted very much he received any of them, before or since; he had made no indication in the following decade that he even knew she was alive.
She wasn’t so sure herself, sometimes.
The smell of the water so near her open window makes her nose twitch; all her life had been spent inland before this man had gone and stolen her heart, her history, her vallaslin, and her hand.
She was empty and broken, unsure of where she came from or where she was going. Her brother Hallen had tried to convince her to rejoin the clan she had helped to save l but when things in the South went, well, south she couldn't sit back and ignore it. It was impossible not to see the disturbed Fade in the horrors that struck down civilians and soldiers alike.
So she fought, without the magic of the Riftmark but with the prosthetic arm left behind. Made of ice dragon remnants, ancient heartwood, and star starmetal her prosthesis was a labor of love between the Lavellan craftsmaster and Dagna. It replaced her need for a staff, channeling her magic better than she could have hoped. There was no feeling in her fingers but an occasional phantom ache where the Fade once pulsed in her palm.
So she fought as she had for more of her life than she hadn't, sending ravens to Crows and Chantry heads alike.
Something was coming, and it wasn't going to be good.