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It had been Varric’s idea.
She’d made charms for them both, in the hours spent sat in the cold, enclosed space of the Chantry temple, waiting for the shemlen to do whatever it was they had to do. From their hushed voices and frightened gazes, whatever they were doing was momentous. So she had used the time to scavenge what she could and sat there near a lantern, weaving and braiding. Her heart was very, very heavy.
The charms had been complete within a few days, before most of the recruits had been organised into the row of tents outside the gates. She had tucked them reverently into the pouch at her belt, because she hadn’t known what to do with them and was afraid someone would see them and decide that they were not what the ‘Herald of Andraste’ should have in their possession. She knew, if she had been brought to task on it, that she would have caused a fuss. It would probably have involved fire. Cassandra would not have been pleased. It was later that day, after standing in front of that throng of people feeling monumentally out of place next to a templar, of all things, that Varric had come to her. He had gently taken her hand, his eyes soft and kind and she had let him lead her to a small clearing just to the right of the temple. A little track led away from the stone and ended in a small clearing within the tress, a natural mound in its centre. At the top of the mound were too newly moved stones, their edges round and uneven, but someone had roughly carved their tops to be mostly flat. When she had looked down at him, her breath catching in her throat, he’d looked away from her to where the stone stood and told her, in his gentle, deep voice, that he’d had a Dalish friend who’d had to bury a member of her Clan away from the usual tradition. He only hoped that Eli wouldn’t be offended by how crude the shaping was - he was a surface dwarf, after all.
She had knelt by him in the snow and thrown her arms around his neck. The great mass of his arms was strange around her back, but he’d held her until she could breathe again and then allowed her to pretend it hadn’t happened. He’d just asked her what she needed and when she wanted it to be. She’d told him and when she’d started to wonder how she was going to get everything she needed he’d held up a big hand to stop her.
“I’ll get it done, Firefly. You concentrate on the important stuff.”
So here she was, standing on a foreign hill merely feet away from more shemlen than she’d ever been around in her life, with the first dwarf she had ever met quiet and solid beside her. Clasping the charms within her palms, fingers grasping at her own hands, she closed her eyes and opened her heart to the forest, to their Gods, to the two people she had lost. The tears immediately began to flow freely and she let them, taking slow and pained steps up the mound to the stones.
For Ghila she had woven leather died dark blue, found at the back of smithy, for her practicality in the hunt. Into this she had crudely carved a hare out of a piece of wood from the ruined houses, dotted the eyes with the red clay of the valley. This was for her ferocity and her passion for protecting her people, like her beloved Andruil. Finally, she had woven it all together with lamsbwool, for the softness in her when she allowed it and the gentle love she would have given her children had she been allowed to bear them. Eli’s tears fell hot onto the stone, quick hot splashes of grief on the ice that covered it.
For Yerevan she had started with that same leather, cut in half to have their last remnant of this world come from the same place. The piece of leather had been long, but it had come from the same beast. He and Ghila would be together in death the way that had pledged to be together in life. For the bright sun of Elgar’nan she had taken a smooth stone from the shores of the lake and carved his vengeful symbol into one side, reflected in the moon of the other. Yerevan had been so angry for so long after he ran from the alienage. His vallaslin ceremony had been intense and poignant - they had all wept for him and with him. And then they had all got uproariously drunk. The last was silk, strong and beautiful, like he had dedicated himself to his new family. All of them.
She took a few steps away and let herself cry a little, felt a like a child and wished desperately that Bri were here. The stones just looked so empty with just two charm bracelets on them. At home they would be piled high with offerings. The sight of the cold grey stone cut her heart almost deeper than their deaths. They had been so alone here. And now, without them…
After some time, a warm hand came down on her shoulder.
“I hope you don’t mind, Firefly, but honestly they all wanted to.”
She turned to him, frowning, then stood in her surprise. At the place where the line of trees ended, there were three shemlen women. Cassandra was there, as was Lady Montilyet and Lady Leliana. For a moment she was irrationally angry with every single one of them and it must have showed, because Cassandra took a step towards her, her dark eyes open and strangely vulnerable.
“You are not the only one to have lost those you love at that Temple, Herald. I hope you do not mind, but when Varric said that you needed time to honour them, we wanted to pay our own respects.”
“They carried you here and without you, there would be no hope. If your clan is anything like the ones I have seen, knowing them has made you who you are. As we honour you, so we wish to honour them.”
This came from Lady Leliana, who sounded so painfully earnest, like she held her soul tight to herself to not betray her own grief, that Eli found herself nodding mutely. Varric’s arm around her drew her away from Ghila and Yerevan’s stones, to the edge of the mound where he held her, waiting.
Cassandra walked with purpose, setting down a heavy amulet between the stones. Eli hadn’t had not come across the words of this prayer, but what she heard was well-wishing, respect and sorrow. That Cassandra used her own god meant nothing in the face of that.
Leliana came with grace, her fingers trailing over the stones. She laid small bouquets of elfroot and some flower Eli didn’t recognise on each of the stones. The first sentence she uttered was in what Eli assumed was Orlesian, but the second made her hold her stomach to keep herself from sobbing.
“”Falon’Din enasal enaste.”
Lady Montilyet struggled a little with the snow, but once she was at the top of the mound she knelt fully, placing her dark hand on each of the stones with a firmness and reverence that Eli could have sworn she felt on her own heart. She took in her hands a necklace of different coloured beads and a dagger with silver inlaid on the hilt and then turned to look at Eli.
“Which should I put where, my lady?”
Eli had to take a moment to speak, grief and gratitude pushing against her lips.
“Give the necklace to Yerevan. Ghila would have loved that blade.”
There was a wetness to Lady Montilyet’s eyes as she smiled, but she brought each to her lips, kissing it before offering it to the sky, the lyrical notes of Antivan soft from her lips in her prayers. After laying both, she stood and turned again.
“Commander Cullen also wished to be here, but he thought perhaps it would not be appropriate given the circumstances. He hopes, however, that you might accept these small tokens for your Clan members?”
At Eli’s nod, she reached into her bag and took out two pieces of paper, rolled and tied with simple ribbon. She placed one on each of the stones, then walked backwards, somewhat awkwardly, back to the trees.
It still wasn’t much, but both stones were more covered now and it gave her the strength to stand tall, away from Varric.
Her voice, when it came, started small and timid, but as she sang, it grew with the weightless mass of grief that lifted from her chest outwards, reaching for the stones. She engraved the images of the rock with gifts placed upon them into her mind, let her song hit the clear sky and banish all thoughts of those charred horrors up at the temple, the clanging doubt of whether she’d inadvertently passed one of them but not been able to tell through the ruin of their bodies. She looked up to the cloudless sky and let her grief soar up into it. It was hard not to find it heartbreaking how alone she sounded, until she heard a voice from behind her join her own. Lady Leliana, it sounded like. A hand clad in cold leather joined hers and it was strangely easy to let a shemlen join her in her song. They stood and they sang until their voices were hoarse, until the silence was loud and strange at the moment they stopped.
They didn’t speak afterwards, but each one of them laid a hand on her before they left, be it on her shoulder, the crook of her arm, even Lady Montliyet’s soft hand on her cheek. Then she was alone and the world was very still.
Only, not quite. Broken from her vigil over her friends’ stones, she noticed something in the woods beside her. Solas stood within the trees, the rough brown of his clothing almost blending him in to the winter bleached trunks of the trees. He was standing very tall and straight, his eyes fixed on the stones. She couldn’t read his face, couldn’t find any emotion she could recognise, but there was something very cold about him. Not cruel in any way, not even disdainful, which was what she might expect. Just aloof and very far away. She felt a moment of nervousness when his head turned so that he might look back at her, almost like she had forgotten he could move, that he wasn’t some sort of statue. The cold melted away from his face as he glanced at the only graves her friends would ever have before looking back. He bowed slightly, his eyelids fluttering closed and then he turned away and she watched his back disappear into the trees, feeling strangely ill at ease.
When she turned back, she gasped slightly, her fingers coming to her lips. Flitting above the stones, dancing slow and calm, were small orbs of lights. Some would morph into hawks, hares, a pulsing ebb of flame, or rays of a tiny sun that struck the silver on the hilt of the dagger or illuminate the dark of the wool.
This time, her knees hit the snow and she let the tears take her. Tomorrow she would be what the world needed her to be. Today, she would mourn.