Chapter Text
It slams into him with the same savage violence that rips her through the eluvian. He knows immediately, instinctually, what it is. What she is.
He bolts from his position against the garden wall, plowing through a huddle of Mythal’s favored servants. The crowd is too distracted competing among themselves. They titter in a cloud of excitement and wisps of residual magic, each attempting to out-congratulate the last as they offer praise to the Lady Mother on this most incredible of successes. No one's braced for a shoulder or an elbow. He carves a path to the raised stone dais in record time.
Oceans toss in his gut as he stares at the unconscious woman. She is fair, sallow after the labor of her harsh journey. He lifts a shaking hand but stops before he rests his touch against her skin. She looks starved- and her wounds!
Mythal speaks, sharp and demanding, "Solas."
His name is the lash of a whip off the Mother's tongue. Her offense swells greater than those he physically bowled out of the way. This is her glory, her victory. Her golden stare pierces clean through him; he's spoiling it.
Words are like ghosts in these moments. He manages one hoarse syllable before his fingers touch the clammy flesh of the stranger's cheek. A terrible pain reverberates through the crowd. There are gasps of awe and pity. Whispers hiss against the back of his neck as the unfounded roots of a mating bond between himself and this poor, hurt woman burrow into him.
It's exposed suddenly, their internal development. He can do nothing to hide it. Mating bonds change the presence of those that bear them. The essence of one’s partner wraps around them, mingling into a slur of shared emotion. The crowd sees it, feels the shift in the air as the bond heaves into place.
It should not be this way.
Bonds are made during a partner’s season. Privately. They are struck after years of companionship and trust, not before a captive audience! True bonds, like the one he perceives within himself, take centuries to cultivate.
Mythal kneels beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder. He lurches over his mate with a raw sound, driven to shield her weakened state. He trembles above her, hand still against her cold skin.
“Oh, Solas," the Lady Mother’s words become sympathetic where they had been reprimanding. She knows. She understands. She is bonded to her love more deeply, perhaps, than any other member of an embodied pair. “She will be made well. Dear friend, I am filled with regret for having done this to you.”
Solas meets her eye again, and the trill of fear that runs through him ignites old, well-hidden anger. Though her words softened, it's an armored hand on his shoulder; a taloned, heavy weight. The shape of Mythal's pupils begin to sharpen before he gathers what she wants. Gratitude: a little show of groveling to salvage some favor from the crowd.
Swallowing down his desire to snarl, Solas projects the genuine comfort he feels at the promise of aid. It is enough. She can see the red of the Wolf coming into his eyes, surely. He is not a God as she is, but she knows he will be soon.
Mythal rises, and the medics that were standing by to support her spellwork swarm him. His trust is too brittle to allow the healers to support his mate. He carries her himself, grateful for their help lifting her from the ground.
Light and limp, she dangles in his grasp like a dead thing. Hollow. He can feel nothing from her save ragged breathing and an occasional, unnatural spasm. She does not respond to any prodding he attempts. Still, behind the walls of the palace reassurances begin to fall from his lips in a torrent of clumsy mumbling. His grip tightens as they race down hall after hall before barreling into his generous chambers. One man places a pillow on top of a spare desk before Solas lays his mate on the surface. Careful of her positioning, he stations himself at the head of the makeshift medical cot. Filth and swelling sit on her face in layers; the others begin to address her condition with an efficiency he does not have.
Contusions run along her entire right side; wrist broken, shoulder pulled from its socket, two fractured ribs.
It is the fall through time that hurt her physically. The healers repeat this like a mantra as multiple oddities surface to dispute their claims. It becomes apparent that none of her wounds are fresh. Deeper abuse lies beneath the most obvious harm: evidence of malnourishment and years of heavy strain. She's discolored all over with bruising. Her flesh has been open so long that it's attempting to knit itself together with a terrible, angry red crust. They insist that she can be healed easily, but this is before they notice something of a more severe nature.
As he feared, maybe worse. Bile rises in his throat, and he resists the urge to flounder away from her.
She is empty. The pulse of magic within her is his own. The Dreaming quivers against her skin, unsure how to seep into the vessel of her body as it would, were she properly alive.
The healers do not know what to make of this, and again blame the journey that the Lady Mother unknowingly forced upon his mate. They don't know how to fix her, with the discovery of this damage to her soul. The vague agreement that reconnecting her with the Dreaming as quickly as possible satisfies each expert, but none are familiar with a spell to rekindle the essence of a being.
He cannot manage to answer or advise, experiencing each revelation and subsequent theory as repetitive blows to the throat. He'll vomit if they keep it up, he knows it. He struggles against the tide of his sickness, and the medical team sets to work without his input.
They are quick and efficient. Someone slides her left glove from her hand, and a sickly green glow pulls Solas from his internal reeling. There's a split in her hand. It does not weep blood, but power. Unadulterated magic that crackles in the air as the set of people around her gawp.
It is his power, he knows it well. Angry and volatile, misplaced in her flesh.
“Leave us!” he snaps, shout echoing in the vaulted ceilings of his sitting room.
The healers and servants scurry, unaccustomed to such outbursts from him. He is unaccustomed to them as well and registers the feral quality of his tone with an abnormal distance. It is as though his words are not his own. Apparently, just as his magic is not.
She lies on the surface of the desk, drooping like a wilted leaf. Her breaths come in easy sweeps now, and this, at least, gives him comfort. He handles her with the delicacy one extends to spun glass. Her head lulls against his shoulder after he lifts her, and he secures it with his chin.
He bathes her, pulls her from the few pieces that remain of her mediocre armor, and strips away the filthy layers that cling to her skin. He hesitates only after he has settled her to soak in the warm water.
Is it appropriate? Will it disturb her when she wakes to know he has bathed her? Do they know one another at all?
In the end, he comes to the conclusion that a bath is an inevitable part of her recovery. Better it be him than some group of strangers, though he may very well be one himself. He resolves to pay the utmost possible respect to her form. In an unfortunate turn of events, his distressed mind chooses to embody this concern by fretting over frivolous choices. He spends a preposterous amount of time trying to select soaps and oils. He does not want to pick something that she will find offensive. It is an awful thing to tend someone who cannot direct, and so he hopes that she will understand that he did not know better, should she wake and disdain the scent that lingers in her hair or on the surface of her skin.
He finds frustration with himself for worrying at trifles, but focusing on that frustration serves only to increase his anxiety. It is quickly evident that their bond offers him a profound sense of relief while performing care tasks. It's not a conscious decision to avoid his own strife by engaging with the acute details of washing her, he simply does. The actions come to Solas in compulsive waves. He directs the water to wet her hair, then scrubs and detangles. The softest cloth is selected to cleanse her skin. He picks her nails clean. Every blister and scab is healed or rubbed with soothing oil. All remaining injuries are managed with haste. He puts cooling balm on the flaky skin of her chapped lips, and he dresses her in one of his spare robes. It is an underlayer spun from supple cotton, and it swallows her up.
So small, nothing more than a wraith of wind-chafed skin and protruding ribs. The flowing patterns of his bedding twist like a sea beneath her prone form. He sits beside her. When she makes fitful sounds in her sleep, he traces the golden lines of her vallaslin over her cheeks until she is calm again. Another servant of Mythal is no surprise. He does, however, find himself perturbed by the suffering that she has so clearly undergone. He cannot begin to imagine the sort of future that would leave her in a position to bear such pain in the service of the Lady Mother. Moreover, he can’t fathom how he might allow this sort of life for his mate.
There’s no sending her back, obviously. The tampered eluvian shattered after the effort of transporting her back in time. Looking at the evidence of what awaits her should she return, he does not think it wise.
Perhaps if she wakes to find him here, the friends and companions of her time will be… less of a draw than a life lived in the peace he could offer?
Resigned to his next and most important task, Solas sets her left hand over the span of his nearest thigh. A plan has been formulating in the back of his mind since seeing his magic in her palm. As it is now, it expels the force of the Dreaming in erratic bursts that disrupt the Dreaming around his mate. He will reverse it. Rather than projecting power, he means to convince it to absorb the Dreaming.
If the process becomes too dangerous, he will find another way.
When he first sets about communicating a new purpose to the mark, it hisses and spits bolts of molten raw magic out to bluster him away. The Dreaming swells in the air around them, eager to swallow what the mark offers. As he suspected it might, the process hurts her. Tears begin running down her face, and she frantically curls her body away from him. He bars her forearm down, refusing to return her limb until his efforts are complete.
Reversing the mark begins to require a myriad of simultaneous spells, and Solas wishes that he had the forethought to ask for help or discuss this theory with someone who was less tipped into the situation. He’s up to his elbows in the process before he reflects on this, and sees no other option but to persist.
Her flesh tries to melt away in the torrent magic. He haphazardly maintains a few healing techniques to add stability to the whole of her arm, but he's not sure if it’s working. She's hyperventilating, churning violently in and out of consciousness, so a quick spell for calm needs to be repetitively cast over her. On top of this, he keeps an unbroken focus on the obstinate mark in her palm. It refuses to cow, lashing out wildly and drawing the attention of many of the palace’s spirits. Anxiety and a spirit of Confusion buzz in the corners of the room. There's a spirit of Sorrow and one of Excitement. Of course, a familiar spirit of Curiosity that has swollen with the palace’s collective speculation. Curiosity accompanied by a very healthy embodiment of Rumor.
A spirit of Love is the only one who dares to enter the situation. Love, the luminous creature, settles on the side opposite him. It melts, sprawling over his bed as it folds itself into a mock elvhen shape. It forms wide shoulders and a long nose. Broad cheeks, a sharp chin, strong jawline. Long fingers- It’s trying to look like him.
He observes from the corner of his eye as it nestles against her. His work falters for just a moment, and the healing spell is the one to lapse. The woman shrieks and jerks. Solas redoubles his efforts toward her flesh and continues to fight with the gash in her palm, but he cannot also initiate another round of calming auras. She remains present for the pain.
Love starts with mumbling. Its tone warbles unnervingly until it settles on a tinny imitation of his own cadence. It speaks to her in his voice with a language that he does not know, something harsh and guttural.
She responds by weeping incoherently in a state not wholly conscious. Love quickly morphs away from its attempt at his form. Eerie and distracting as it may have been to watch the spirit play him, it jars Solas to see how quickly Love decides that their connection does not offer enough comfort.
The spirit roils and twists down small. It tucks its head against her body and rubs at her cheeks with a tiny hand. It speaks to her in the voice of a child. This particular rendering disturbs him significantly more than the last, and nearly all of his spellwork fractures as he fumbles through several dire conclusions drawn by the spirit casting the form of a child.
Love senses the impending error and shifts. The woman's cries become more profound, and she begins to struggle against his hold on her wrist. It is a long and difficult moment before the spirit sifts through enough of her affections to attempt a new form.
The next shape is the most detailed of them all, for it exhibits facial features and a sense of the intended coloration. Love becomes a woman. Lean and tall, with lips stained dark and an oddly familiar yellowy stare. Sweeps of dark hair fall around the face Love draws from her memories. At the sound of the woman’s voice, his mate is soothed.
Love beams, triumphant. It scatters several spells over her, removing the burden of healing her flesh from him as it whispers things he cannot understand.
Solas knows that they've managed something useful when the magic coalesces into an overwrought bubble of tension. It bursts audibly as the mark inverts. The Dreaming begins to pour into his mate with zealous purpose, and their intangible companions cheer. Small licks of her emotion begin to stir in the air near her skin. He leans close, panting from the exertion of so much spellwork. It's hard to decipher much, but he senses her relief: a sweet and mild swell in his throat. Perhaps it is his own?
This success is a momentary crutch. He will need to find a way to remove the mark from her. For now, however, he allows himself to be gratified with the small victory.
Love remains wrapped around her body like a protective shawl. The intent in its rendered eyes speaks of a predatory nature. He finds this feature most unbecoming in a spirit of Love, though he recognizes that it is the barest guise of the woman to blame for the trait.
Love’s face slowly becomes indiscernible beneath the heat of his glare. It slips back into a properly amorphous shape, the vibrant shuffle of light that makes up its form muted now that it's exerted such magical efforts.
“Begone,” he commands it, surprised when the spirit does not obey.
It scrutinizes him with haughty contempt until its eyes fold back into its churning face. Lacking the true structural form to sit rigidly, its posture manages to relay an impression of stiffness. Stubbornly, Love remains.
His temper flares, spurred by his sudden state of mental exhaustion. “All of you!”
Quickly then, the spirits depart. Love, no longer channeling an object of high affection, flits out of existence in the corporeal realm before anything more be said to chase it away.