Chapter Text
“There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Prelude: Dinan’shiral
It all starts as fragments.
Of destruction, of hope, of love.
–
The whole South burning, burning, the stench of Blight so overwhelming it brings tears to her eyes. The Wardens are there, the Legion of the Dead have left the underground to join them, Varric’s old friend Anders has created a barrier between the diseased ground and the people that have to cross it and there’s a whole army of apostates that helps him hold it.
In a fortress near Starkhaven, Warden-Commander Elissa greets them with an exhausted face.
“Loghain and I will hold the line so people can get evacuated until we run out of soldiers,” she says, wiping blood and sweat off her face. “And then I swear I will beat up whoever is responsible for fucking up this sodding ritual Morrigan told me about. That little fool has the blood of Ferelden on her hands.”
“Rook’s barely more than a child,” Ellana says, thinking about the wide-eyed girl who met her in Minrathous. Kind and resilient, but certainly not capable of seeing the consequences of her own actions ripple across the borders. “You’d terrify her.”
“Good.”
*
And then Minrathous as the heart of corruption with tiny fragments of hope scattered in between the littered streets, agents passing messages carefully around the dangers and the death, holding their breaths awaiting the next movement of the gods.
“Solas, I do believe, helped us take out a whole army of Venatori,” Dorian tells her in his hideout, pouring wine in large goblets in front of a fire that doesn’t warm her.
“I heard.”
“But word on the well, not street but rather in the murky Shadow dragon corners is that his agents have all disappeared by now. They’re afraid. Of Elgar’nan, of course, but also of Solas.”
Ellana looks at the flames, then down at the shimmering red wine.
“I know,” she says, slowly. “And they should be, should they not? He is the Dread Wolf.”
Dorian gives her a long glance, but says nothing else.
*
Theirs is a story of truths, however unspoken, however fractured.
“I can’t believe he lied to you,” Scout Harding says to her once, still reeling after the attempted Qunari invasion at the Exalted Council.
“I’m not even certain you could say he did.” Her arm hurts, her heart hurts, the taste of longing sharp at the back of her tongue and her mind feels like a puzzle, where pieces snap into pieces one by one. “He… left a lot of fragments.”
The truth is that he keeps most of his best and some of his worst to himself and that it’s simpler to see the whole of him in a blighted Minrathous, a city both protected and doomed by his actions.
All that immense power - the capacity for destruction, for ingenuity, for goodness; all that broken grief.
“The things that I have done…”
She knows his names, his faults, his heart and there is no hesitation or fear as she closes the distance between them, for good this time.
It all starts as fragments.
Of shame, of regret, of guilt.
*
The Veil is different, so the Fade is different; the Veil is him, so he ought to be fluent in its erratic logic but instead, he finds to his absolute horror that he cannot make sense of it at all. The Fade is shaped by intents and emotions and his are scrambled, burning, dying.
He returns to the place he once knew better than the mortal world only to find that he is exiled, cast out of his own mind and he shakes like a leaf in front of this discovery, folded into himself in a shattered mirror of the last time he bound someone’s life force to protect the world.
And he is terrified of failing even this, of corrupting even this, of twisting this one good deed into a final betrayal.
“You will not,” Ellana says, unfaltering as she wraps her arms around him, brings him inside, turns his face away from the map of devastation that forms itself around them.
*
His prison is a broken Titan, a shattered library of lost knowledge, a blighted Elvhenan; it stops staying consistent as he returns to it and his attempts to untangle the threads exhaust him beyond words. When he had Elgar'nan's madness to occupy him, the Blight running free, he could find peace in the pain and the enduring. Now, only turmoil remains.
Every moment he tries and every moment he is merely returned to the spot from where he started. It is madness and failure and it brings out a frustrated anger that does not dissolve a single knot of gnarled, rusty chain, nor does it cure a spot of Blight.
Every moment, he sees Felassan and Varric, floating in and out of view, recent horrors in an existence that has only briefly held anything else.
*
“They’re stronger than you think, you know,” Felassan says from wherever he is hiding, out of sight and reach, as though he is speaking from his final dream. He’d been afraid; Solas remembers the shape of his friend’s fear in the Fade, how it sagged against the point of his dagger.
“I know,” Solas answers to the void, the echo of his voice carrying over the vast stretch of darkness. “I am so sorry. I was wrong.”
“Perhaps next time you can try to be wrong in a less magnificent way, you old bastard.”
“I don't think I truly know how to do that.”
“No,” Felassan agrees. “You probably don’t.”
*
“I very much regret what happened, Varric,” he tells the dwarf from across the great rift that remains between them.
He doesn’t look the same without his crossbow.
“I know you do,” he says and he sounds the same, perhaps angrier.
Solas keeps his hands busy by creating a flower that wilts within moments, then another one. “I wish I could undo it… if there was a way to-”
“What’s done is done, Chuckles.” Varric shakes his head. “You know, I think there’s a life lesson for a god in here somewhere.”
“I am not a god,” he retorts, but it’s a moot point.
*
“We were supposed to be better than that, Wolf,” Felassan whispers at the edge of a meditation, or around the conclusion of a thought, every thought. Slips inside Solas’s mind, into every attempt at speaking to Ellana, disrupting every string of reason applied to the task at hand. “But you, you made demons of us all. And then you murdered me.”
*
Varric speaks as much in death as he did in life. It’s exhausting.
“You know, Chuckles,” he says from behind what appears to be a table inside what appears to be a tavern. The scene is dark and warm and the room smells of saltwater and iron. Kirkwall, unblighted. “I've been thinking about your fatal flaw.”
“My fatal flaw?”
“Every character worth their salt has at least one.” He holds up his tankard as if toasting Solas. “So what’s yours?”
“Pride, one assumes.”
“A little too obvious, don’t you think?”
“Arrogance then. Insubordination.“ Solas sighs. “No, forgive me, insubordination cannot be a flaw in a thinking creature. Superiority, perhaps.”
“Nah. You know what? You’re sentimental. Worst kind of sentimental, too.” There’s a streak of darkness lingering between the words. “You care about everyone getting caught in your pragmatic little chess games and you can’t deal with it so you wrap it up in grim elven fatalistic horseshit. Just so you can look at yourself in the mirror.”
Who says that I can, Solas thinks but doesn’t say. Instead he lets out a frustrated sound, rising from the depths of him. “I am not sentimental, Varric.”
“C'mon, Chuckles, who are you trying to convince here? Me or yourself?
Something harsh and heavy cracks in Solas’s chest; he feels the dagger burn in his palm, like a wound. “You said that to me. Before I…”
“Before you what?”
But before Solas has answered, Varric disappears again.
He returns to Ellana with the scent of the lyrium on his hands and another harsh tangle in his mind and when she kisses him, he clings to her, more grateful than he can even express for a solid shape among the ghosts.
“I came here to heal the hurt that I have caused,” he says with his mouth in her hair. “But the prison is constructed like a labyrinth and I’m....”
Lost.
“We will find our way, vhenan.” Ellana holds steady, her hands on his shoulders, grounding him against her. The faint trace of his magic in her flares up, like a wisp of connection, of hope. “I am not the expert on the Fade, but my guess is that we must start from the beginning.”
So yes, this will be a post-DAV Fadefic about atonement and love and juicy lore because I can never dig around enough in those things and I want to write about how the black city turns golden. I hope you will tag along.