Chapter Text
Valta can hear the Titan’s song. Solas is certain.
He has not spent enough time around dwarves to know truly what their stone sense is - whether it is a byproduct of having once been Titan-spawn, present in all dwarves but simply easier to ignore on the surface, or whether it is something unique to dwarves born closest to Titans. He still does not know, not really, but he knows enough to be sure of this; Valta can hear the Titan singing, and it is drawing her home.
She walks as if entranced, and Renn stomps alongside her, looking just as at ease in the narrow, claustrophobic caverns as he does everywhere else.
“Wait,” says Bull just before they round a corner, and they all hesitate.
Lyrium eyes blink at them from the darkness. Something scuttles down the passageway with a shuffling echo.
“What is it?” Lavellan asks in a voice just barely above a whisper.
“Ambush ahead,” the Iron Bull says, keeping his voice low and cocking his head. He must be listening to something that the rest of them, less trained in warfare, had not thought to pay attention to. “Small group, but not darkspawn.”
“How do you know?” Dorian asks. He is a loud, emphatic whisperer, as if the only reason he ever whispers is for dramatic effect rather than secrecy.
“I can hear them shifting their weight,” Bull replies. “Wearing armor - heavy enough not to rattle, but it scrapes against itself. Darkspawn don’t wait like that, and they don’t pick out ambush locations like that. You stumble on darkspawn. Whatever that is is waiting for us.”
Lavellan frowns, rubbing her fingertips together. “We need to get through,” she says, sounding as if she’s speaking mostly to herself. “There’s only the one tunnel - perhaps that’s intentional? A bottleneck for defenders - of what? Is there a thaig?”
“I thought it was just a mine,” Renn mutters. “A really old mine.” He shifts his weight uneasily, then stops - maybe aware of the noise that it makes now that Bull has called attention to it.
“No,” says Valta slowly. “There’s something more down there.”
“They must be able to see better than us,” Lavellan says. “There are no torches here, no lights - we’re certain they want to fight?”
“Pretty fucking certain,” the Iron Bull says. “Given that we’ve been chatting for a while and they haven’t said ‘hey, guys, we just want to take you to our castle’.”
Dorian coughs a laugh.
“Yes,” Lavellan says slowly. “How can we - lightning? If we make it very bright, we should be able to at least even the playing field.”
“Unless their night vision is supernatural in nature,” Solas says quietly. He remembers impossible swarms of dwarves, moving as a unit, piloted by a single thought. The fingers of something greater.
“Better to try and fail,” Dorian says, attempting good cheer. “You know, I consider myself something of an expert at making things uncomfortably bright and exciting.”
❖
Solas has grown fond of Dorian over countless wandering hours in spite of himself, so he has very little shame in admitting that the light show is reasonably impressive. Their would-be ambushers blink spots out of their eyes too late - Lavellan advances behind them, breaking through their rank like a wave, and the rest of them cleave through the remains of her passing.
The ambushers - dwarves? - are wearing lyrium armor, which makes something in Solas recoil. They fight with absolute wordless brutality, as if they have no concern for themselves, and their eyes, even after they fall to blades and magic, shine with lyrium.
When they are dead, the twisting cave system returns to silence, but Solas can tell that they are not alone.
These are not the dwarves that Solas had known and fought and killed droves of millennia ago, but they are so much closer than the modern variants. He does not like it.
“They’re fused into their armor,” Valta says, sounding simultaneously horrified and fascinated. She stoops over the corpse of one of the dead dwarves, fingers brushing the lines of lyrium limning each edge of the armor’s plates. “How -? The lyrium?”
“Ancestors preserve,” Renn swears grimly.
They lay the dwarves out, weapons by their sides, in some nod at honoring the faithful dead. Lavellan looks sad and resigned. Solas wishes he could comfort her, but he does not have the words.
❖
Valta finds sets of lyrium runes on the wall and sits to copy them, her eyes flicking across text that she says is almost too ancient to read. It is so dark that the runes act as a beacon, as if they are intentionally being drawn from place to place, and Solas can only imagine that that is the case. He wonders if the lyrium-armored dwarves would have killed Valta if she had been alone, or if they would have let her pass; he wonders whether the Titan communicates to them at all.
They have to kill many of the dwarves in between each set of runes. The defenders fight viciously and silently until they die.
They share water and bread and watch Valta work on the last rune set, her fingers tracing over carvings that foredate her grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfathers. She unravels secrets of Titans, of their drones, of small portions of what the world had once been. They are revelations for her and for Renn and for everyone who isn’t Solas.
“And they’re protecting a Titan , ” Valta says, sounding awed and horrified once she has worked through the translations. “These Sha-Brytol, the defenders - it’s not for a thaig. It’s for the Titan.”
“Great,” Renn says. His tone suggests he does not think it is great. “So the earthquakes are a Titan. What exactly do we do about that?”
The Iron Bull shrugs his axe up higher. “Well,” he says. “You’re not gonna believe this.”
“They’re not just the size of mountains,” Valta says. “They are the mountains. You can’t just - hit it with an axe and expect that to work. It’s - they’re everything. ”
Solas feels dizzy with anxiety. The darkness, suddenly, feels very pressing, very close, and very claustrophobic. He feels as if he’s heard this conversation before a thousand times. He remembers going in circles about how one kills a Titan - how one kills the earth and stone itself. His pulse flutters in his throat.
“Maybe we can talk to it,” Lavellan suggests in a tiny voice that says she perhaps knows what a silly idea it is, and all of Solas’ panic runs out of him at once, like tipping a bucket on its side. He loves her with the sort of love that leaves an ache behind.
“Do they have ears?” Dorian wonders.
“They must have some intelligence,” says Valta. “They were the gardeners.”
Solas remembers Mythal and her priests saying the same. We are the gardeners, they had said, as if they had been taking dead land and giving it life rather than slaying the land that had been. We are freeing the dwarves from their servitude. We are giving them dreams. This death will be a mercy.
Solas looks at the dwarves before him. Is this better? Surely they would think so, because they have room to think. But -
Maybe we can talk to it, Lavellan had said. Solas wonders who had spoken to the dwarves before resorting to killing their gods. Had they been soulless and witless? Or had they just been different?
He hates this place. Rarely does his guilt feel so cutting than it does here, surrounded by a tomb for his sins.
❖
Another descent. Valta is led forward by something only she can hear. They reach a cavern of pure raw lyrium in beautiful branching patterns, the ceiling so distant it may as well be the night sky speckled with lyrium as if by stars. The lyrium branches looks like veins, Solas realizes with a swoop of nausea, and immediately he understands that they are not near the Titan.
The others do not know. They murmur in awe at the size of the cavern and the glow of the lyrium, but Solas has seen lyrium like this before. Not like this - not from this angle.
The lazy slosh of the sea echoes like breathing, then stutters under the rhythm of another earthquake. This one is strong enough that it’s hard to keep their feet - Lavellan staggers and the Iron Bull steadies her with a hand on her shoulder to keep her from tipping off the edge into the abyss.
“We must be getting close,” Dorian says, and Solas almost wants to laugh. Dorian has no idea how close they are.
They kill more Sha-Brytol, leaving their unseeing lyrium eyes staring up at the lyrium-freckled cavern ceiling. There is so much lyrium that Solas feels sick with it - the amount of power they are surrounded with, the danger, the insidious memories.
There is a numbness to the horror of being inside a Titan for the first time in millennia. Is it possible for such a creature to know the wrongs that he has paid it?
They find one last set of runes, which glow sweetly and sing the lyrium’s hymn. Valta touches them with reverent fingertips, tracing the shapes of them. She reads them their last warning of purity, of going no further, of punishment for transgressions.
“What makes the Sha-Brytol pure?” Valta wonders. “The armor?”
Renn grunts, brief and contrary. “It’s whatever the opposite of the gangue is,” he says, shaking his head. “The Stone’s in balance, but only because we keep it that way. The Legion of the Dead cuts away the bad parts, the gangue, to keep the Stone pure.”
Solas wonders if that is the Blight, leaching out of the Titan and into its blood and the stone and everything else it touches. He wonders if the dwarves have been fighting against the Blight since they awoke to individuality.
“Killing darkspawn and keeping the Stone in balance? They should get you guys a raise.” Bull toasts Renn with an invisible tankard.
“We’ve been telling them that for years,” Renn says. “They keep telling us dead dwarves don’t need paydays.”
❖
They make camp there, in the little alcove tucked away from the lyrium sea. The waves breaking should be a soothing noise, but Solas is reminded, brutally, again and again, by every thrumming wave, that they are inside a creature so vast that it defies understanding. The others talk quietly amongst themselves and Solas has never felt so incredibly alone. They have never seen Titans from the Fade, they have never witnessed the full extent of them, they have never been in twinned horror and awe of the power that a single creature can wield.
Does he envy them? Does he wish he could forget? The questions haunt him.
❖
He stands on the edge of a precipice, a dagger of pure spelled lyrium in one hand and an orb crafted of a Titan’s heart in the other. His hands shake with the knowledge of what he must but cannot do; it is against his nature. He cannot - please do not ask him to, he should not.
Mythal stands over his shoulder, her fingers wrapping around his wrists and raising his hands higher as if he is a puppet. This is not how it had gone, he knows - she had not moved him physically. He had done this terrible thing himself. He cannot absolve himself of this guilt.
“Solas?”
That is not Mythal’s voice. He knows her in the Fade, he knows her anywhere, but she should not be here.
Mythal’s fingers are so cold against his skin, which he had never asked for and never wanted. He does not want to -
“Solas, what are you doing?”
Below them, a Titan reaches for the horizon and brings the land over it in an endless wave that crushes a city, every city. Solas doesn’t remember if that had happened or not; it had been so long ago, and he had been so young and so afraid.
He remembers legions of Elvhen dying, falling into great chasms that had opened out of nowhere. He remembers smears of blood and nothing more as the remains of great armies. He remembers Mythal asking him, telling him, begging him, ordering him - we are losing this war, my friend, he remembers. I need your wisdom, or our people will die.
Our people. He does not remember when she had started thinking of herself as apart from them, as something to watch over rather than being a member of. Our people.
He remembers that it had been easy, that terrible thing that he had done. He had gathered the Titans’ dreams up and cut them at once - or had he? Or had it been a slow, agonizing process, one Titan at a time, one terrible wound after another in his soul? - and he had put them -
His fingers are white and shaking on the edges of a box full of something that he had never wanted to do. Mythal holds the lyrium dagger in her hand, loose and dangling, as if it is a toy. She calls it the wolf’s fang, half-laughing.
It is terrible, what we are doing, his own voice echoes around them, weak and trembling even in his memories. Why hadn’t he been stronger? He could have refused her - there are so many times where he could have refused her. But he had been hers.
The box turns black. The box turns red. The box burns his fingers because there are fingers sticking to it, bone and flesh and the hunger for power that corrupts. Andruil had worn armor of - and Ghilan'nain had crafted creatures of -
His fingers touch the lid of the box, curling around the edge. Do not make him. It is terrible, what they are doing. Please don’t make him -
“ Solas,” Lavellan says, and she stops the dream before the box opens. She has become such a talented dreamer. He is so proud of her. He wishes he were dead instead of allowing her to see this.
“Yes,” he rasps, and steps back from the edge. “Yes, vhenan.”
He is outside himself - his younger self - and the wolf jawbone around his neck feels heavy as an anchor. His younger, prouder, brasher, stupider self looks down at the box and Mythal looks at him, both of them still as statues. Still she holds the dagger.
“Solas,” Lavellan says again, like she is reminding him who he is now. Yes, he wants to say, but the words stick. “What is this?”
Solas looks at her, with her lyrium-blue eyes and her mouth that was made for kissing.
“The worst thing I have ever done,” he says, sounding almost as raw as he feels. “The worst thing anyone has ever done.”
Lavellan looks out over the edge of the cliff, where the Titans topple in infinitely slow motion. Pillars of the land they had become in truth - they make up the hills and the mountains of it. Hail Mythal, adjudicator and savior. Let the People witness her triumph, and his despair.
She is no idiot. She knows, now, what a Titan is. She knows that they are more ancient than she can possibly conceive of, and for him to have seen them moving - she knows. Not the whole of it, but she knows.
“You killed them?” She takes a step closer to the memory of Mythal, who watches Solas’ younger self with a tiny half-smile that he had loved at the time.
“Worse,” he says, and he hates it, but by everything he holds dear, it is such a relief to say - to admit. “We stole their dreams. We could not kill them so we lobotomized them. Into eternity, they reach for what they no longer have.”
He waits for her rebuke - her hands on his back, pushing him, at last, off the ledge - but there is nothing.
“Who is ‘we’?” she asks, his curious girl. He loves her. He cannot help but love her. Perhaps, all along, he'd been made to love her.
“We - the Evanuris. Mythal and I.” But it had been him, in the end, hadn’t it? She had done nothing but ask. She had been able to kill one, but not all of them. “It was me.”
Lavellan gazes at the horizon, which is shaped differently than what she will ever see in the waking world, and then returns her eyes to Mythal. She must recognize her goddess.
“She looks like Andraste,” Lavellan says, and that makes Solas bark a laugh that sounds half like a sob.
“No,” he says. “Andraste looked like her.”
❖
They sit together away from the chasm, close but not touching. Solas feels as if he cannot bridge the gap between them, and Lavellan does not.
He looks at the sky, through which perfect white clouds drift. It had been a sunny day when he had sundered the Titans from their dreams. He remembers that it had been warm on his face and had felt like puddles of blood on his hands. It had been an act of terrible magic; his hands had been clean, but the violence had left stains on his mind.
The warm breeze plays in Lavellan’s hair. She looks like she had in that dream of Rivain that they had walked in together what now feels like an eternity ago.
“Is your name really Solas?” she asks after a time that is both infinite and over in the span of a heartbeat.
He blinks at her. “Yes.”
“I know all of our Gods,” she counters. “I am my clan’s First. There is no Solas in the pantheon.”
He wants to laugh, but he cannot. How can he love a woman for her mind and also fear the conclusions to which it can jump?
“No,” he says. “I was not one of them. Not - the way that you are thinking.”
He searches for a way to tell her without telling her, to tell her without her hating him, to tell her without lying again, and finds nothing. He feels wrung out by nightmares and worn down by the incessant panic of being so deep beneath the stone, so far from the Fade. He does not want to lie. He wants to put his face in her hair and die there.
“Solas,” she says gently, and reaches out so she can overlap their fingertips. She is so warm. “I can see when you’re about to lie to me.”
His mouth quirks up. Of all the ironies - the god of treachery and rebellion being a bad liar. It’s just as well he never claimed to be a god.
“Do you remember what the Nightmare said to me at Adamant?” Solas asks. He cannot look over at her, because he does not want to see her face the moment she realizes that she hates him.
“Dirth ma, harellan,” she says - quotes. “Ma banal enasalin. Mar solas ena mar din.”
Her memory is so good.
“‘Harellan’ had another meaning, once. The Dalish took my title and feared me so deeply that the word means ‘kin traitor’,” he says. “Speak you, traitor. Speak you, trickster. Speak you -”
“Fen’harel,” she says, because she knows enough elven now to connect the base words. She is a First. She knows her gods. Even the ones her people hate.
He cannot look at her. She pulls her hand away.
He cannot even say that he had not meant to lie, because he had. He had not wanted her to know. What does he do now? For some reason - perhaps insanity - his mind flickers to the half-finished fresco in the rotunda, which he will never see again. So many other things should take higher priority, and yet -
It had been his home, for a time. Because she had been there.
“You know,” Lavellan says. When he looks at her from the corner of his eye, she has twisted her fingers together in one of her only anxious tells. “We used statues of Fen’harel to frighten away evil spirits from our camps.”
Solas snorts and puts a hand over his mouth, surprised at himself.
“On reflection,” she continues, “they must not have done much. Considering.”
Considering he is here, enfleshed, not particularly useful or powerful or godlike in the least.
“No,” he says, and manages to bite back the urge to add that he would have, for her, if only he had known. If he’d had the ability. If they’d been in danger from spirits at all, he would have. “Vhenan, I -”
“Am I?” She interrupts, putting her fingertips over his mouth so he cannot finish his sentence. “Your heart? Is that true?”
“Yes,” he says against her fingers, because he refuses to allow her to, for even a moment, misunderstand how deeply she is loved. “Yes. As long as there are stars, I will love you. Until we are dust, I will love you.”
“I will love you after we are dust,” Nehnan says, and kisses him with her eyes open.