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He is hardly born before he is marked. Gasping, a man and a newborn at once, he shakes as they measure his breaths and his pulse, things that are important now, things that mean he is alive. He has a heart, and lungs, and they beat an insensible rhythm in his chest. Blood rushes in his ears. Being alive is very loud.
This is a gift, she tells him.
She can reach and touch him now, and she does, a hand on his brow, twining her vines into his skin. It hurts. He trusts her. It is part of the ritual. It will keep him safe. He has not yet taken a single step.
He will follow her anywhere, even unto this.
This body is what she asked him to become. It was a sacrifice, but he can tell he is meant to be grateful, and so keeps the thought crooked inside his chest. Still, it is a thorn. They call him Pride, now, and he does not argue; call him a man and that, too, is a role he can play if she wishes it. What he is now, what he will become, he does not know.
He can only trust in who he was before, the version of him who was formed from something greater than mere physicality, and in his oldest friend, whom he has so long admired.
For ages the two of them were equals, beings of pure spirit. Benevolence and Wisdom make fast friends, and epochs were spent in conversation, in harmony. But in this world he sits at her feet, her second. An unfamiliar hierarchy, but he can sense the envious gaze of her court, and feels shame at his discomfort. Service is, after all, what he came to provide. It must be his pride that rankles at her authority.
With a body, he can be what she needs. Her requests no longer run the risk of warping his spirit, of corrupting him. He can wage war, he can fight, he can give orders and kill—all things the people now require in their war against the Stone. Too many have died in the conflict; if he can help bring it to a close, it is his duty.
The body—his body—requires a great deal to maintain it. He had not realized how much time was spent on this: the rituals of sleep, of feasting, of cleaning. It is another rhythm to learn. He has hands, now, and plenty to occupy them. He learns how to hold a spoon and then a blade. He learns how to write, how to heal a wound, how to turn the magic that flows so easily from him, the essence of his being, into destruction.
To be surrounded by other bodies is uncomfortable. He is no stranger to verbal sparring, of course, and accepts that the arts of war and survival and defense are wise to master. It is quite another thing to be in the press and noise of people in a crowd, or to stand in the ring with another and feel their arm around his throat.
For a long time after the crossing he shudders at touch—it is embarrassing, in this world of courtiers and gossip. To be seen as a coward would shame her. He quells the reaction over the years, but touch remains disconcerting, be it the press of flesh or steel. He is forever surprised to look down and find something solid.
When it is all too much, he retreats to the comforts of his mind, of dreams, where he can almost be as he was. Speaking with spirits is a balm, but a bittersweet one. They are everything he is not, now, and their simplicity soothes and agitates him in turn. At times he feels as fragile and ephemeral as a dream, as though he could easily slough off his flesh and return to what he was. But it is impossible, and soon he is returned to himself with a jolt of noise or heat.
She notices his reluctance to engage with his body. This disappoints her, he knows. She took easily to a body, as did the rest of them. It must be a fault unique to his creation. He agonizes, picks apart her words and expressions for proof of his failures. He must redouble his efforts, become what she needs him to be.
This new life is not altogether painful. He enjoys his moments spent watching animals and documenting plants. This is the physical world at its purest and most beautiful, for all that nature has its own cruelties. He marvels at the swirl of fractals in a shell, at the fierce love of a mother bear, of the sweet taste of nectar in the spring. He learns to paint to capture these wonders, becomes a wolf to learn how beasts think.
There is pride to be found in beauty, she says, looking upon his work with an indulgent smile. But I did not bring you to this world to idle away your days drawing and dreaming.
She is correct, of course. He has a new purpose, and it is violence.
He learns that wisdom is a knife, all the sharper when tempered by pride. Cleverness and ruthlessness, seeing the weights and balance of power and pushing them just so. There is satisfaction in such subtleties, in his gifts put into action in her service. The courts of Elvhenan are his to bend to her will.
The first time he kills is a mistake. He is not in the vanguard; he is at her side, her general, and they do not expect the attempt on her life. The children of the Stone are desperate; they have not before tried assassination. A knife edged with lyrium. He takes the blow meant for her, and in a clumsy exchange, turns the knife on the attacker. He means to capture, to question, but in the flurry the knife goes too deep.
He watches the life fade from the eyes of this creature—person—whose language he cannot even speak, and bile rises in his throat that has nothing to do with his shallow wound. Something deeper than flesh fractures inside of him, spreading like a barb-tipped arrow.
She promises that his body shields him from being corrupted. He wonders, in the bloody aftermath of battle after battle, his hands slick with blood, if she lied. He cannot afford such concerns, and nor can the people. The war necessitates his actions, necessitates hierarchy, necessitates the simplicity of good and evil.
They call him her lapdog. When he shows his fangs, he becomes her wolf. His name matters not—he is her sword. He will win them this war, and all he has done will be worthwhile. He will be worthwhile. He will forget the life fading from the child of the Stone.
She is beautiful and distant as a star, something he now notices, for in the light of new eyes she is changed. She is a woman and a spirit both, a distinction that once meant nothing to him. Now it does, though he cannot quite parse what it means. He shudders at her touch the same as any other, but it is different, somehow. He is not ignorant of sex; has even learned to enjoy the tactile and strategic pleasures of it. He knows what his devotion looks like, what courtly whispers make of them. But lust is not what he feels for her.
When he is alone with his traitorous thoughts, he thinks it might be fear.
—
The people deserve better, he begs.
She levels a frown at him, an expression he sees now more and more often. She dislikes these disagreements, is bored now by his agitated moralizing. Her mind has turned to empire. The Great War is over. She no longer needs his violence, and his wisdom is shattered.
She is assured of their righteousness, and as Pride he should agree. But he is tainted. War has broken him open, turned his spirit rotten and bloody, and he cannot staunch the tide of what roils inside him. He is corrupted down to his bones; sometimes he thinks he must be blighted, and in secret must check his body for evidence of it before he can calm again.
The titans screamed when they were sundered. He hears them still, hears them when he attempts to sleep, hears them in the great halls of power, hears them in his pounding heart, his heart that was crafted so carefully from their blood.
Perhaps it is the fact of their blood, of his creation, that causes his body to hold fast to what he tries so desperately to forget. Strange things make his skin flush and his head swim: the bright blue of the sky reflected in silver, the sound of distant thunder, the sharp smell of lyrium. That he is brought low by such trivialities is a source of shame, one he goes to great pains to hide. What sort of wolf hides from the sky?
She shows no signs of similar anguish. They did such terrible things. Yet if she regrets their actions, there is no proof of it. Perhaps, as a leader, she cannot afford the luxury of doubt; certainly not the appearance of it. So many of their people perished at the hands of the titans—it must be his sentimentality that shies from retribution’s satisfaction. She would tell him that victory is its own answer. That ending the war was worth any price. Such equivocations give him no comfort—they never did, for all that he parroted them.
She says that peace is the wisest course. The people need the stability of the Evanuris, so long as their worst excesses are smoothed. Change will come in time, when memory of the war has faded. Once he would have bowed to her superior judgment. Now all he tastes is blood.
My people serve me out of love, she says, and he hears the veiled insult all too clearly.
She doubts his love? After everything he has done? He feels the desperate impulse to reassure, to beg her forgiveness, to kneel at her feet. It is a routine he knows by heart. He wills himself upright, to free himself from this chain of command that has twisted him from friend to soldier to petitioner.
Then there is no need to mark them, he counters.
I do not mark them for my vanity. The brand gives my people protection to walk Elvhenan without fear. That is worth preserving. To take it away would be cruelty.
There is no geas upon her followers like the bloodbound horrors of Elgar’nan, it is true. She inspires deep devotion, shackles forged of love and not pain. And yet. As her lesser, he sees what she does not. Not all of Elvhenan lives among crystal spires. The suffering of those without freedom is not always so obvious as a chain and a whip.
Slavery is slavery, he presses. Even the kindest master cannot escape what she is.
I ask nothing of my people they would not give willingly.
Something curdles within him, an old feeling. He says nothing, cannot manage any response to her words that will serve him. His own brands feel like deep gouges across his face. But now is not the moment for argument. He needs her, as she once needed him, and to win her favor again he must hold his tongue.
She steps toward him. He steels himself against stepping back.
Her hand on his cheek. He dips his head, bends to meet it. Ever her supplicant. He was a fool to think that they could ever be what they were, in this new world. Her hand strays to his hair, strokes a stray lock behind his ear. He cannot suppress the shudder that passes through him, and he looks away at her pitying smile.
You must move on from the war, my wolf. Our victory was righteous and absolute. And yet you search for new battles around every corner. Are you not satisfied?
We fought to protect our people. That fight is not over. They suffer in subjugation while the powerful play games of godhood. They need us.
Her hand drops. You see no difference between the Evanuris and myself?
Of course I do. If you join them, it will only lend credibility to their madness.
I will take your wisdom to heart, she says, which is how she speaks to him now, dismissively, as though he is someone else, someone who did not give up everything he was to be by her side. He supposes that she must resent him now, his neediness, his idealism. He has little else to offer.
He is just a man who serves a woman, but he used to be more. As a spirit his advice held a certain weight, a moral or at least rhetorical purity. Now that he has been corrupted by a body, now that he is flesh and blood, he is just another voice in her ear, jostling for position, for attention, for power. A courtier.
Yes, he used to be more. And so did she. The idea shivers down his spine. A betrayal, even in thought, yet it is a truth he can no longer ignore.
Benevolence requires lessers on which to bestow itself. What he asks is against her nature. She will never cede her power. Not for the people; not for him.
He came here for her. Trusted her. What is his place if not by her side? Nowhere. But what is his purpose if he turns from injustice, from the cries of their people?
He sees now that this was not one war with a simple ending, but an endless cycle that must be broken. With their enemy defeated, the mighty turn on each other—turn even on their own people. Power must always justify itself with a target.
She claims she will sway them from their cruelties, that a kinder touch will teach them kindness in turn. Perhaps she even believes it.
And so she goes to Elgar’nan, to her seat with the Evanuris, to divinity. A place he cannot follow.
The first person he frees is himself. He casts the spell alone, and his shaking hands scar his brow when he rips out her roots.
—
She is dead. She never joined his rebellion, and he did not save her. He was brought here to help her, and now he has failed and she is gone.
Slain by his enemies, yes, but it may have well been his own hand that held the knife. Spirits of pain show him the memory, and he forces himself to watch again and again. She died in agony, stabbed in the gut by the weapon he crafted for her. A message from her killers meant for him alone.
He should have returned to her side the moment he heard whispers of the blight. In his pride he abandoned her to the madness of his kin. The world she hoped for is lost in her passing. For this he cannot be forgiven.
In his grief he becomes base, not a man but a beast. As a beast, violence becomes easy, and he turns further from his spirit. He licks his chops at revenge like a hound at meat. Hope is a cruelty, he thinks, as he plucks a fragment of her soul from her bloodied chest and locks it away. He can at least keep a shard of her safe, from himself most of all.
His devotion is worthless. It is all he has.
Vengeance is the only path to atonement he can find through his rage. The pieces of who he once was cry out in horror, but he has long since learned how to quiet the screams. Any sacrifice is worth what he must pay. If he must throw himself on the pyre, all the better.
For a thousand years his body sleeps, and he is free of it. He wanders the dreams as he used to, so deep in the Fade he can hardly find himself again. But he does, and when he is born once more, the world he made in her wake is ashes.
—
She hands him a bowl of stew. Her hand brushes his, a whisper, and he drops the bowl in the dirt.
Ir abelas, she says, why don’t you take some of mine? Her offer is real, he realizes after a moment of suspicion. She is not taunting him for his error. Nor does she pity him his reaction. The Dalish, he thinks, must hate wasted food.
He was not going to eat anyway, and so shakes his head. I have had my fill.
She looks at him oddly, and his paranoia wonders if he has given something of himself away, but hours later he finds bread and cheese wrapped in her scarf in his tent. A simple kindness, for someone she hardly knows. There is no ulterior motive—cannot be, for here in the hinterlands of a ruined world he is no-one.
His hand, where she touched it, still burns. He avoids physical contact in this new world whenever possible, shying from the handshakes and casual jabs the others engage in naturally. It is an awkward affectation he cannot afford in this world where magic-wielders are reviled, but it cannot be helped. He is still half in dreaming, and to be reminded of reality turns him too far on his axis to function.
The Veil is an abomination unto the natural order, one he alone created, a construct to protect his people that only severed them from themselves. It presses thick on his senses, like walking through water. The Fade twists on itself, corrupted, broken, and so far from what it should be, so far from what he once called home.
Death, blight, injustice. When his pride is not inflamed, he knows he is all that the Dalish call him and more. His good intentions and regrets mean nothing without action. Purpose alone propels him forward, the certainty that he can undo the doom he has cast upon the world. He is merely a vessel for this purpose, and he must discard what does not serve it.
But fear is not what burns his skin when she touches him. It is much more terrible than that. He wishes nothing more than to lean into the soft warmth of her, to deserve the curious smiles she sends his way.
What horrors he wrought with this body. He is shamed by the thought that it might be worth it, for the sake of her gentle touch upon his skin.
She demands nothing of him, expects nothing but his companionship and his advice. She wears her titles poorly, discards them at every opportunity. She does not relish power, though she uses it to help those in need. From them, she expects nothing in return, hates the worship they offer her freely. She insists, even as the drowning waves of history close over her head, that she is just a person.
You came here to help, she says, as though it could ever be that simple.
At first he thinks her kindness naïve, a weakness that will be broken by command, but as the months pass in her company, as she shoulders all their burdens, as she molds the world to her will, as she kills and grieves and laughs and rages, he learns again how very wrong he is.
He assumed them all shadows, quicklings, ignorant creatures. Another mistake for the pile. They are as varied as the empires before them, as capable of cruelty and kindness in equal measure. But these mortals have something his people lacked—a natural end. His fault. Yet the more he observes, the more he admires what their short lives propel them to do—change and revolution come at unthinkable speed, fervor for a better world stoked high by their limited time. So different from the stagnant immortality he remembers.
Friendship, courtship—these things took centuries to grow in Elvhenan. And yet he finds himself settling into strange camaraderie with the Inquisition’s people—and they are people—all too easily. The hollow shell of the world begins to fill in. In this new life he is merely Solas, a humble apostate, and in this disguise he is truer to himself than he has ever been in the waking world. There is no burden of leadership, of command—he is called only to teach, advise, and learn. His face is a lie that feels closer to truth than any title he has worn.
The traitorous thoughts rise again: this could be his life, if he willed it. But the burden he carries is not for himself alone.
—
Another friend dead, another spirit he could not save.
You made it kill. You twisted it against its purpose.
His friend deserved better than this. To be corrupted so wholly, to be degraded by the whims of these cruel, heartless creatures—to be tortured into the antithesis of itself—
Ignorance and fear are a deadly combination, and one for which he has no mercy. He snarls like the beast he is, hate hot in his heart and ready to ignite.
She stills his hand with his name. He turns to her with a scowl, certain that in this, at least, his wrath is righteous. Can he not have even this?
He quiets at the tears in her eyes. Not for the fools before him, not for his friend, but for—him. Solas. He falters in his surety.
He will not turn away from her act of kindness. To deny her this is to deny her spirit, and he will never do that.
He makes his own way back to Skyhold, making it a few miles before his legs give out from under him. He mourns alone, in the ruins of all that was. He traces his face where branches used to bloom. Sometimes he thinks they must still be there, that he miscast the spell, for they still feel thick on his face.
—
He envelops her and a stone of peace settles in his chest, anchors him to the earth. For the first time in his long life, he gives himself willingly to his body. He knows all the pleasurable tricks of Elvhenan and forgets them all, throws them into the void and falls into the warm space between them, not debased but holy.
In this way he tells her the truth. In the press of his thumbs to her hips, in the breath ghosted against her neck, in their bodies’ joining. This is the truth of him, and of her—not their titles, not their names, not the terrible things that lie behind and ahead of them. His body speaks a language with her spirit that says what he cannot.
When he is with her, he is only himself. And for her, that is somehow enough.
He is utterly undeserving of this, he knows, but the shame of his many betrayals does not dull what he feels. It is doomed. It is the only light he can see.
—
She leans beside him on the battlements, watching Compassion at work in the healing tents below. The day is bright, unseasonably warm, and Skyhold’s occupants are scattered amidst the courtyard, eager to bask in the sunshine.
He seems lighter, she says. Happier, maybe.
Yes, he replies, envy thick in his chest. He does.
Her face twists. I shouldn’t have done it.
His eyes flicker to her, to the vallaslin over her furrowed brow. Do you regret your decision?
No, no, I—it just feels wrong that I made it at all. Why should I decide for Cole what he is?
He weighs her troubles, an unexpected pang of grief in his chest. Why, indeed.
He asked for your guidance. He trusts you.
Even so, she sighs. I hope I did not lead him astray. To be Compassion, in the middle of all this—a gesture to their fortress, their war—will he be safe?
He is silent for a long moment, too long, and she watches him. He cannot imagine what his face betrays. At last, he replies: He will be safe so long as you are by his side, to remind him who he is.
—
They are slave markings, he tells her, the half-truth of a coward, and watches something inside of her break.
The real truth is much simpler than his past, his titles: all he can offer her is pain.
His duty must supersede all, or it has all been for nothing. He cannot be Solas, her lover—to become him is a betrayal of all that came before. All she asks from him is trust, and it is just what he cannot give. He has learnt that mistake in blood. He will not make it again.
She cannot follow him down this road. It would only corrupt her spirit, the kind heart that he holds so dear.
He sees her as she truly is, something rare and precious. And so he protects her in the only way he can—he leaves.
—
At the end of the path he walks is death alone. He is ready. There is blood in his mouth. Here, at the denouement of all things, at the precipice of change, the ghosts of the dead rise to meet him.
He shies away from her like the dog he is. He cannot breathe, cannot think. His failures made manifest, his rotten core bared. Now he cannot even claim pride. He hunches before her, a supplicant again, the devotion he has carried through the ages turned to bitter poison in his mouth. What she must think of him now, reduced to nothing but a trembling sob.
He offers her the knife. The only justice he has left to offer. Whether she is benevolence or retribution or merely a phantom of his grief, it is what he deserves.
She measures him in her ageless gaze, unmoved by his wretchedness. But the blow does not come.
I used your wisdom as a weapon, and it broke you.
The many wrongs we did, we did together.
I release you from my service.
He falls to his knees, and the spectre fades. It is too much. And yet. Something is loosed in him, some old, slow arrow of guilt and shame. An old scar that tears free, letting stagnant blood flow once more. To heal or to kill; a mercy either way.
His heart comes to kneel beside him, her hand on his chin, guiding his gaze to hers. She says his name and it rings in his ears like a benediction. He can hardly see her face for the tears in his eyes.
He has long imagined this meeting, what she might say, how she might feel. Has thought of all the ways she would spit at his feet, of how he could possibly explain that what he wanted could never be enough. But there is no hatred in her eyes, no disbelief. He wonders if devotion might not be corruption after all—for there is no terror to be found in her arms, only this gentleness he cannot possibly deserve.
She takes his hands in hers. Lay down your burdens, ma sa’lath. The world’s troubles are not yours alone to bear. You have tried so long to fix what was broken.
He presses his hands to his eyes. And every time, I failed.
Fingers brush his cheek, turning him from his self-loathing. A small smile meets his gaze, one he’s seen across campfires and dreams.
You got some of it right, she says. The world is still here, after everything. People are still fighting to make it better, just as you did.
When he looks at her, he can almost believe it. He cannot speak.
You do not have to be alone. Not anymore. Let us help you—let me help you.
He exhales, and the weight of the world shifts on his shoulders.
He thinks of a story he told her once, of a Qunari baker sneaking extra sugar into her bread. A small act of rebellion, yet no less powerful for its size. He has witnessed a thousand such sparks of light against the darkness in his dreaming. His mind shifts: what he once saw as mere dying embers, remnants of what was lost, are in truth stars blazing in the night, eternal and far above the transient horrors of the world. Such a truth cannot be brought low by him, or the blight, or the Veil, or any petty tyrant claiming godhood.
History was never his to rule; he never once wished it to be. He has been a sage and a soldier, a courtier and a rebel—always just a single person, one among many, a single drop in the storm of change.
The world endures, just as his oldest friend endured, changed by the ages but no less beautiful and terrible than it has ever been.
Before, he could not let that change his course. Now he trembles at the threshold of a door he thought long locked.
I do not need this anymore, he thinks, with a clarity long muddled by millenia of grief. So many years, and such a heavy weight. His to fix, his punishment. What was his alone, he could control. Was that not a form of hubris? Has not his burden been a comfort, in a way, been what kept him moving through the years when even his own selfhood was forfeit? The world does not turn on his axis; it never did. He can lay it down, at last, lay down his pride and find again what he was meant to be. Another way.
He can turn to the light, to her, to creation. He can protect and not destroy. He can heal and not sunder. He can love, and not be afraid. The only vow that need guide him is the one he makes to his heart.
She offers her hand, her life, her forgiveness—he does not beg for it, does not even ask for it, but she gives it all the same. The stars of hope are in her eyes, right before him, and he will not turn from them again, not in this life or the next.
At the edge of the world’s end they lay down their titles. Where they are going, they need only their true names. When they step into golden light, side by side, they do so as not gods or legends but merely themselves—two travellers, two spirits, two lovers.
Together, always.
—
I am not alone. Even
As I stumble on the path
With my eyes closed, yet I see
The Light is here.
Draw your last breath, my friends.
Cross the Veil and the Fade and all the stars in the sky.
Rest at the Maker"s right hand,
And be Forgiven.
—Trials 1:1-1:16