Chapter Text
“What do we know about the artifact?” Inquisitor Lavellan asks. She buzzes with a taut energy, pacing the War Room in restless rounds. Though it is peacetime, she is dressed in her military regalia and she folds her arms, one flesh-and-blood and one prosthetic, over the plat of medals on her chest and drums at her upper arm with the fingers of her real hand. Her sleep the prior night had been uneasy and if she stops moving she fears she may lapse into slumber and her addled obsessions. There is work to be done and the Inquisitor has no time to dwell on dreams about wolves. The morning sun, a terrible bright white in the chill air of the Frostbacks, spills in through the embrasures and illuminates the room with its cutting shafts of light.
Atop the wooden map table an image-sending crystal glows dully in the castle’s stone shade. The magical communicator projects the flickering green forms of Dorian Pavus, Lace Harding, and Chantry scholar Bram Kenric into Skyhold. They stand interspersed with the Inquisitor, her Ambassador, and her Commander though they are halfway across the continent on the Free Marches, hidden away in an Inquisition stronghold in the foothills of the Hundred Pillars mountain range.
In the same emerald luminescence the image of an orb suspended in a glass canister hangs low over the table. The sickeningly familiar artifact is the subject of the hushed conference and a cause for secrecy and concern. “I want to hear it all. Because I, for one, am optimistic about the new orb,” adds the Inquisitor with some flippancy forced into her voice. The joke is not a good one and does little to ease the tension that has settled in the room.
Lavellan has to try and laugh. She feels a creeping dread approaching, as if her nightmares crouch in wait at her periphery. Some days she walks half in a dream stalked by a lone, loping wolf that has made itself manifest at the edge of her consciousness. It circles closer when she sleeps, slowly closing its spiral around her. Last night she thought it might lunge forth and grab in its maw her throat. The lone canid is a monstrous, unnatural beast with multitudinous red eyes belying its ravenous fixation. Lavellan refuses to fear it: once she was a huntress and she will not deign to be prey.
“You’d be the only one. We think that like the Anchor, it’s of Elvish origin,” the spectral figure of Dorian Pavus says, stroking his chin through the immaculately trimmed beard he has grown to match his mustache. Even cast in the reduced colorations of the crystal’s projection, the Inquisitor notices that grey is just beginning to intersperse with the black of his hair at his temples.
“What do you mean, think?” The Commander asks with a grimace. He stares at the orb almost angrily and Lavellan thinks that if he were in a room with the actual item he would seize the thing, throw it to the ground, and smash it to pieces to be rid of it as soon as possible. The former templar has been palpably uncomfortable since news of the artifact surfaced. As typical for one trained in his Order, Cullen has always been suspicious and cautious of magic, and the birth of his first child a couple months prior only served to steel his vigilance. Cullen has suffered torture at the hands of abominations and watched the world torn apart by arcane forces and he is determined to spare his daughter these horrors. “Harding, Kenric, and the Tevinter professor discovered the artifact in an Elvish ruin. It seems like discerning its origin should be cut and dry.”
Dorian repeats somewhat testily, “It was found in an Elvish ruin, yes. And that’s why we think it was made by the ancient elves. But we can’t say for certain. Look at the writing there.” He points to the floating image of the encased orb, which rotates slowly in the midst of the small assemblage. Runes are cut into the surface in an alphabet unfamiliar to Lavellan. The foreign lettering twists in a strange way and seems to morph as the orb is turned. Once she attempts to focus on the transformations they fall static—some sort of optical illusion? Dorian finishes, “I’m no expert, but those aren’t in any known Elvish script.”
Josephine hums in thought as she observes the image before her. The glass box around the orb is intricately held together with thin metallic embellishments that curve and curl down the panes like the roots of a delicate plant. Artifacts and ancient mysteries are largely outside the purview of her diplomatic work, but she regards the object carefully. She offers her ideas: “Are they in some form of Archaic Dwarvish, perhaps? There was contact between the elves and the dwarves, and I have been told there are a number of alphabets for the Archaic Dwarvish language that have fallen out of use. If you don’t have a specialist on dwarves, I do have a number of contacts in Orzammar and Kal Shirok who we might be able to send transcriptions of the runes if you can take them down accurately.”
“Oh, yes! That would be wonderful. And I can speak to some friends of mine at the University,” Professor Kenric responds. The academic seems overwhelmed by the situation but he is as excitable and good-natured as he has always been in his small handful of encounters with the Inquisitor over the years. “Elves are not my specialty at all, but I’m of the opinion that it’s written in some sort of secret cipher. If you look at a handful of sects within the early Orders that became the Chantry around the Divine Age, about half of them have utterly unrecognizable codes to prevent unwanted parties from being able to read internal communications. I don’t see why the ancient elves wouldn’t have similar practices. My Tevinter counterpart thinks it’s likely, too.”
“Speaking of the Tevinter archeologist,” Dorian says, “I’ve been working with Professor Serranus to study the artifact. He has good experience discerning what magic remains on ancient artifacts, but so far our efforts haven’t been, shall we say, forthcoming.” There’s something engrossing about the slow twirling of the image projected by the sending crystal, Lavellan thinks. The orb moves independently in the box, calmly but sporadically as if it were floating in a river while locked into place. “Together we haven’t even determined the alloy of the orb! We did manage to find some information about the case. That’s made of glass infused with Fade material and from the craftsmanship the Professor is just about certain that it was made by elves. It’s very heavily enchanted—to what end, we’re not entirely certain. We’re going to need time to discover more about the case first. After that, we can start our study of the orb itself,” Dorian says. “Serranus and I were discussing the possibility of having other mages help. All of the names he’ll suggest will be Tevinter, of course, but I can try to see if we can reach an agreement about who we might bring on.”
“We can’t thank you enough for traveling out to the site on short notice, Dorian,” Josephine says. “Not many of our research mages on the site are equipped to handle what you’ve taken on, and it is extremely kind of you to drop everything to come to our aide.”
Dorian laughs. “You’re very welcome! I’ll have to say. This is all rather exciting, isn’t it? I was worried I would be bored with the magisterium out of session for the next few months. But what luck, an ancient mystery just fell right into my lap! I’m just glad I wasn’t very far away when my sending crystal lit up with your calls for help.” Dorian had been in the south of Tevinter. Lavellan knows that means the magister was clandestinely meeting with a certain Tal-Vashoth mercenary. Horned giants are an especially unwelcome sight in Tevinter and Dorian must travel to the frontiers or abroad to rendezvous with the Iron Bull. He’s taking time out of his vacation and likely disappointing his lover to help. Dorian sighs, “Besides. I don’t like the idea of an incredibly powerful magical elvish artifact falling into the hands of my countrymen right now. What we have could very well be some sort of,” he fishes for a phrase and seems unsatisfied with what he comes up with, “super-weapon. Right now with all the internal fighting, the possession of one of those is the last thing the Imperium needs. Professor Serranus is a good man of sound judgment and he does deeply care for the wellbeing of our country and its people. I think I may be able to leverage the political situation back home to convince him to allow the Inquisition custody of the item without a fight once we’re done with the preliminary research.”
“You’re doing good work, Dorian,” Lavellan says. Even though the Inquisition now calls the Imperium an ally, the orb will not fall into Tevinter hands if she can help it. This, more even than the research, is what she had called upon Dorian for. When he first assumed his assassinated father’s seats he had been a political pariah. The past several years have seen Dorian become a popular reformer and a powerful voice in the magisterium. Despite the incessant attempts on his life, his countrymen heed his words. Something Dorian said floats to the front of Lavellan’s mind: “How do you know it’s incredibly powerful? You said you can’t find anything out about it.”
“If you would like a more scientific answer, I’m making a bit of an inference from the complexity of the enchantment on the glass. It’s very delicate to the point it has no physical component to its protection and it doesn’t use much energy, but it’s extraordinarily intricate. This was painstakingly devised—that’s not something most would do for an object that doesn’t pose some sort of danger.” Dorian pauses before continuing, “If you want a less scientific answer…the whole thing just feels strange. It’s like it has an aura about it! It’s not, say, obviously sinister or even wholly unpleasant, though I can’t say that I like it.”
“Dorian’s right about the aura,” Harding says in a quiet voice. During her years of scouting adventures, the dwarven soldier has come face to face with most dangers the world has to offer and she is not easily perturbed—yet she seems perturbed.
“I feel like I’ve almost gotten used to it,” Kenric says, “but it’s just in the back of my mind, almost buzzing.”
“It’s not buzzing, not to me, but…there’s not really a better way to describe it.” The former scout, current lieutenant adds, “Everyone around it can feel it…even me, and dwarves really don’t feel magic things.”
The Inquisitor does not like the idea that the item is somehow special. “Maybe the magic was affecting the environment? Though strong enough energy can manifest itself, most magic has to interact by manipulating something in this world, or the Veil. When there’s a magical drop in temperature, it’s not really the magic that makes you shiver. It’s the cold air,” Lavellan suggests. She has no magic of her own but she has always sought to understand what she could of it. The arcane is a very real force and to regard it as an unknowable terror as most of the continent does is foolish. Her studies, however, have only shown her how incomprehensible many theories of magic are to her. As such, she defers to mages on most matters: “Dorian, could you discern anything about what you felt?”
“Not much. It wasn’t pure energy, and it had negligible effect on the Veil. It’s possible it might be affecting us instead of the environment.”
“That’s not something I like the sound of,” Cullen says. “There’s some possibility a demon might be bound in the item.”
“Be careful, Dorian,” Lavellan says, and the magister nods.
“I certainly intend to be.” Dorian looks towards the image of the orb in the center of the table, an air both of excitement and concern in his regard. Tevinters are not squeamish when it comes to odd magics, and Dorian has worked with highly dangerous arcana before. This seems to unsettle him.
Now that she is sufficiently disturbed by the thing that’s image floats before her, Lavellan wants to hear its story from the beginning: “Speaking of when you found the artifact. I heard it in brief when you contacted me with your sending crystal and I read the reports you flew back with the birds, but for obvious reasons,” namely the ever-looming threat of espionage, “the details in those have been somewhat sparse. I thought that when we set up this expedition with Tevinter, our plan was to dig up Chantry artifacts, not Elvish ones.”
The Inquisitor is aware that something must have gone awry for the archeologists and their military escorts to come away with their strange haul. Lavellan had arranged the expedition herself as just one part of a bigger diplomatic effort being orchestrated by Josephine—The Southern Chantry and the University of Orlais had long held a map to the ruin of a monastery tucked away in the Hundred Pillars. Though the monastery’s ruin is within Tevinter territory, the site had long been considered lost by the country, much to their historians’ well-documented consternation. The monastery has considerable historical significance to both the Southern and the Tevinter branches of the faith, and, more importantly, was rumored to play host to a long-lost treasure.
An invasion of the South by the Qun is inevitable in the coming years. The whole continent must be willing to stand together. The Tevinter origins of Corypheus and his Venatori extremists have not been forgotten in the South even eight years after the end of the Great War. Resentment boils beneath the smooth surface of diplomatic relations and the alliances the Imperium has reluctantly entered into with many of the Southern powers have been at best uneasy. To foster goodwill, the Inquisitor approached representatives of the Black Divine to propose a joint expedition to the lost monastery that would celebrate the shared origins of the continent’s faith.
Famous and widely-read intellectuals would be tapped to lead the expedition to generate public interest in the cooperative effort. Professor Evander Serranus of Qarinus, a polyglot mage whose well-received work spanned subjects ranging from the society of Arlathan to biographies of the Black Divines, was chosen to represent Tevinter. In kind, the famed scholar Brother Ferdinand Genitivi was unanimously selected by a Chantry Council to head the Southern contingency. That plan fell through when, a week before he was to leave for the Marches, Genetivi was injured. During an ongoing excavation in Fereldan of an Ancient Age Alamarri ritual ground, Genetivi himself fell through some poorly-constructed scaffolding into a rather large pit at the site. Bram Kenric had eagerly agreed to travel forth from the University of Orlais and serve as a last-minute replacement on the potentially dangerous mission as a disappointed Genetivi retreated to his Denerim home to nurse his broken leg.
Once the monastery was excavated and its contents were cataloged according to plan, the North and the South would broker an agreement over possession of any treasure unearthed, and an academic conference and great exhibition was planned to be held in Antiva City three years out to showcase the findings. The peaceful collaborative research was to be a sign of civility and an appreciation of common history. If the South’s diplomatic relationship with Tevinter can’t actually be good, Lavellan is determined to make it look good.
If the artifact causes some sort of schism in her mission, Lavellan will be furious. Yet she fears that it may pose greater problems. “I want to know exactly how you came upon it,” the Inquisitor orders.
Lieutenant Lace Harding’s wavering figure answers, the shoulders of her projection barely reaching above the table. “It’s a long one, Inquisitor, so I hope you have time. So the dig had been going for a couple months and had been pretty uneventful. Lots of treasure and stuff that Kenric calls ‘material history,’ but not really much else. I sort of expected that because it’s pretty remote—I mean, it took over a week to ride from there to this place, and we were going fast. Anyways, it hadn’t been too bad guarding the excavation of the monastery in the mountain valley. We had a bit of a problem with bandits, but it wasn’t very hard to manage, especially with the mage guards Tevinter sent. I didn’t think much of it. I’ve been put on a couple of dig sites by you guys before, and it’s pretty standard for people to try to rob them. They’re big targets with expensive goods and plenty of academics who have no idea how to handle a blade. Easy pickings, unless they’ve got people like us there. So it was all normal, until it stopped being normal.”
“As it does,” Lavellan sighs.
Harding gives an exasperated humming chuckle. “You’re telling me. We decided to start running patrols on some of the nearby mountain paths to watch for more attacks. One of our patrols didn’t return. We sent out more patrols to investigate, and we found the missing soldiers dead, but nothing about who killed them. But after that incident, a group of bandits we never saw before started hitting the site regularly. This was about four weeks ago or so? We would drive them off back up into the hills but couldn’t manage to kill any—they’d come in vicious but pull back hard, and they had barriers up that would block our blades and arrows while they retreated.”
“So there were mages among the bandits,” Cullen says. “Unsurprising. It’s far from unheard of for apostates to fall in with criminal elements.” Technically no mage is an apostate since the Circle’s abolition, but many still use the word to refer to hedge mages, especially ones who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Once she is sure that the Commander is finished, the little lieutenant continues: “They kept coming. One evening when only a couple workers were out on the site finishing up for the night, they hit us hard and drove us way back. They nearly killed a couple of our pickets before we could get together a full retreat from the site—it was lucky the guys Tevinter sent knew some healing magic, because we didn’t really pack a lot of poultices and there were injuries. When we circled back to the site to check damage, we noticed that our so-called bandits didn’t take any of the artifacts that we had unearthed.”
Cullen nods, “Strange indeed. Chantry artifacts sell for good gold on the black market. For a bandit to leave those—”
“Right, that’s just it,” says Harding. “Bandits want to steal things. We began to think they were doing the fake bandit thing. You know, where they only pretend to be robbers because they’re trying to drive people away from somewhere without drawing attention to what they’re guarding. One day we got a bunch of our soldiers and the Tevinter guards to make a push to follow them back up into the mountains when they attacked us. We chased them for a pretty long while and had a couple of skirmishes. We started having some trouble tracking them when we got up to a pretty high altitude…but that’s when we found the ruin.
“We were cautious going in because it would have been a good set-up for an ambush, but after casing it out and setting our own positions outside, we decided to go in. It was cut in to the side of the mountain and you couldn’t see it until you were right on it, but there was this great big garden courtyard overgrown with plants I’d never seen before in my life. It was snowing outside, but it was warm in there to the point where I was sweating in my armor. I could tell the ruin was made by ancient elves immediately—I remember scouting in the forest around the Temple of Mythal before the battle there all those years ago, and there were all these mosaics in this one that looked just like the ones on the ruined outcroppings there.”
Lavellan asks, “Do you think the ruin was what they were trying to keep you away from?”
Harding stops to give a little hum. “It had to be. But once we were there, the bandits didn’t give us any trouble, which was…weird if they were trying to keep people out. Maybe they gave it up for lost. We had a pretty big force. From what I could tell from all their raids, there were at most thirty of them. They could do hit-and-runs, but storming us with that number would have been suicide.”
“Lady Harding sent back to the site for Professor Serranus, me, and a number of our assistants to be escorted to come look at the ruin,” Kenric adds in his thick Starkhaven accent.
Harding continues, “Before the professors got in, we secured the surface level. The upper area looked like people had been living in it, but no one was there. We recognized some of the armor lying around: it definitely looked like the bandits had been based out of there. At first I was thinking that maybe they were staying in the ruin because it was warm. Once Professors Kenric and Serranus got there we decided to go deeper inside.”
“I don’t do elves, really, but from how Serranus was reacting…I knew what we had there was exciting,” The Professor says jovially. “I think you would have liked to have been there—I remember you were so interested in history and my archeological methods in the Frostback Basin, and I assume a finding from the time of Elvhenan would have been especially exciting to you, what with you being a Dalish.” Lavellan intends to ignore the grammatical error but isn’t quite sure how to respond to the suggestion that she would be interested in the ruin because of of her race and culture. She supposes that it is actually in some part true. She has been steadfast in agnosticism as long as she can remember, but her upbringing had instilled in her somewhat of an interest in her People’s mythological past. Before she was old enough to wander off to barter for books and trinkets from the outside world or drink and swap stories with wilderness travelers, tales of Elvhenan were the only things to occupy her mind aside from the drudgery of base survival. Noticing the lack of a response from the Inquisitor, Kenric pauses and frowns. “That wasn’t right, was it?“
Lavellan suppresses a sigh and tries to hurry along the conversation. Since Kenric asked: “It’s just ‘Dalish,’ not ‘a Dalish.’ What else? Lieutenant, continue with your report.”
Harding goes on, “There was evidence of fighting in the upper parts of the temple. There was blood stains on a lot of it, and they didn’t look very old. I’m not sure who or what was fighting—there might have been sentinels, or revenants or something, but by the time we got there, anything that had been guarding the temple had been taken care of.”
“Lady Harding speaks the truth—it looked like it had been the site of a gory mess. We went down further into the ruin. There were magnificent carvings that Serranus said were scenes out of the mythology of the elves. We got to a big locked door, with a magic seal and a barrier.”
“It looked like someone had tried to blow it up,” Harding says, “but we couldn’t tell how long ago. There were char marks on some of the rocks, like someone had used incendiary spells or runes or maybe some sort of explosive but couldn’t get past the barrier. They’d excavated into the walls, too, but the barrier continued on through the stone—it’s not really a surprise that the ancient elves managed to seal a door better than apostates seal cave mouths when they want to hole up underground, heh.”
“Professor Serranus has excavated countless ruins from that time before,” Kenric begins an explanation. Lavellan’s lip twitches slightly in irritation. Despite the unavoidable interest her upbringing had instilled in her she has never felt any sort of personal attachment the triumphs of Elvhenan, but the thought of Tevinters continuously plundering what the once-proud civilization left behind is not one she relishes. From what she understands Professor Serranus is a thoughtful and kind man, but the tradition he works in is monstrous. His ancestors had wielded what elvish magics they could appropriate for themselves to topple the sparse remains of an Empire in turmoil and decline, and then had the nerve to claim this theft proved their racial superiority. Without noticing the small flash of discomfort from the Inquisitor, the Professor continues, “Serranus took a look at the door. He said there was a barrier with a sort of magical lock on it, and that it was still strong and dangerous even if had been decaying for some time. It seemed that much of it had been manually stripped away, but whoever was trying to open it had hit an impasse. He worked for near an hour applying his magic to its puzzles. The whole time, we waited for the bandits to come up on us.”
Harding goes on, “I had our troops stationed outside the temple and in the main hall to watch out for the bandits. We thought for sure they would come attack us and try to pin us down in the temple. They had to have been the ones who were stripping away the lock, and they were so persistent before…but they never attacked. We thought we heard something in through the back, and we checked up, but there was nothing. A couple of birds, maybe, but the bandits were nowhere to be seen. But even the whole time we were down there in the crypt—”
“It wasn’t a crypt! No bodies.”
“Oh, oops. Sorry Professor. You learn something new every day with this guy,” Harding chuckles, and the professor smiles. The happy expression remaining from the laugh drops off Harding’s face as she continues, “Anyways, Serranus got the lock to the not-crypt open. And when when he did that, that’s when I felt it—the aura. It was so strange, like my stomach was lifting and there were pinpricks on my skin. I could hear something, but when I tried to focus on the noise, it was gone. I wanted to go in deeper and I wanted to leave immediately. We all felt it and we just knew there was…something down there.”
“We travelled down into the ruin, for a long, long time. We reached the far bottom, which Serranus said was a sanctum for meditation. Serranus lit a sconce with that odd green mage fire, and the whole room just lit up! There was a large statue of two birds in obsidian. The birds were intertwined like they were fighting. They were set top of this big white marble ball and pedestal at the end of the sanctum. Some of Serranus’s assistants that came down with us said the statute was a strongly functioning ward. I asked if it was what was making us feel strange, and they were unanimous in the assertion that wards didn’t make anyone feel like this. We stepped onto the pedestal, and one of my assistants realized that one of the blocks at the foot of the bird statue wasn’t solid. We put up a barrier and removed the tile, and in it, we found the orb.” Kenric motions towards the floating ball. Lavellan stares at the image of the strange artifact and for a moment a somatic feeling of intertwined attraction and aversion swells within her.
“The mages called it a foci. Serranus told me that in Elvish artwork, gods and heroes of myth are near always depicted carrying them. Several of them had been found by Tevinter archeologists before, but they had all been inert. Serranus also mentioned that they were near always at the centerpiece of a temple, and well-guarded by bound spirits, enchantments and traps. But this one was hidden beneath a tile, no spells past the locks, and inside the sanctum, no sentinels, no revenants—I was horrified there might be revenants—no nothing. It was odd how…un-guarded it was.”
The Inquisitor gives a curious hum. “So Serranus told you no one has ever found a functioning foci.”
“Yes, this is an archeological first! He also says no one has ever found one in a container such as this. It seems to be quite the oddity. Other than the orb, the temple was bare apart from the beautiful murals on the walls. There were a number of wards in the bird sculpture and elsewhere, but near all of them were built into the structure of the temple. There wasn’t much of anything to remove from it, and frankly I was wary to take what we did. But we decided we shouldn’t leave the object for the fake bandits, even if we were risking a curse by taking it.”
Dorian laughs. “A curse! I bet Serranus got a laugh out of that. You all believe the most silly stories about magic.” He frowns at the image. “Though I suppose with that thing, I understand the concern.”
“And that’s when Harding first contacted us through her sending crystals. I remember this part,” she says. She had to make the call about where to take the artifact, and she had chosen the closest Inquisition facility—a walled estate acquired to make space for secret research. As uncomfortable as she is with letting those loyal to outside interests, especially Tevinter, into the facility she knows the hall is staffed, secure, and equipped with large magical and alchemical laboratories suited for the study of strange artifacts. “What else do you know about the temple? The statue you described is probably a depiction of Dirthamen’s ravens, Fear and Death.”
Kenric replies, “Yes, that’s right, from what I understand. Serranus said the inscriptions inside the temple payed honor to your god of secrets. He was able to notice a few more names of deities, and the name of the Great City, but little else. We had graphite and vellum scrolls on us, so we took some etchings to take them to people who might be able to read them. From what I understand no one speaks Elvish but the Dalish, and that’s mostly a creole with Common now, and the written language is all but dead and even academics who center their careers studying it have a good deal of difficulty. Colette—she’s tenure track now! I’m so proud—will be able to help, and the Tevinters have pledged their efforts but I think we may need more pairs of eyes…”
The academic trails off and gives a thoughtful hum before suddenly jumping. “I just recalled! Inquisitor, when we met for the first time in the Frostback Basin, one of your companions spoke Elvish fluently. We got to talking a number of times and I could swear he mentioned he could read the written language.” Oh no, thinks the Inquisitor. Not this. “Ah, why can’t I recall the fellow’s name?” Not him. She had been trying not to think of him all morning, not to let him in her mind. “Hmm. He was a mage, and, of course, an elf. A couple of times when we were in camp, he would come and ask some rather insightful questions about my body of work so it is rather rude of me to fail to remember his name.”
“I’m not sure who you’re referring to.” Lavellan raises her shoulders in a shrug and closes her eyes for a long moment. Closing her eyes would feel nice if not for the discomfort. She can feel her advisors, Harding, and especially Dorian staring right at her: they all know that she absolutely refuses to carry any sort of conversation about Solas. She had avoided the topic after he had left her, and actively sought to silence it once he reappeared as a monster from legend set on tearing apart the world.
Fen’Harel, she harbors no aversion to discussing. The Dread Wolf has been her adversary in a shadow war spanning six years and it is her job to speak of him. She can hate him and refuse to fear him. Talking about Solas as a person is different somehow. So many happy memories, all predicated on lies—reminiscing upon the barefoot vagabond with whom she had fallen so deeply in love makes her stomach turn with shame.
In a shambling attempt to obfuscate the identity of the elven mage, she explains, “The Inquisition keeps mages mixed in to a number of regular infantry and scouting regimens, you know, and there were a number of elves deployed on that particular mission. We maintain an archive of all our old personnel logs for record-keeping purposes, and I could try to find some names for you. Off the top of my head I have nothing though.” She frowns and tries her best to look like she is dredging through her memories of an adventure nearly a decade in the past to bring up the name of a soldier from the rank-and-file. “Sorry. If it helps, I do know plenty of other people who can translate written Elvish.”
Kenric seems puzzled. “Odd. He seemed to be working very closely with you, and he definitely was in our travel party when we explored the ruins. He had such good explanations of the Elvish motifs Inquisitor Ameridan left behind in his affects. I asked the fellow if he wanted to be cited in my paper, but he declined very politely. I would remember for certain what his name was if I had cited him.” Lavellan is prepared to continue to pretend to have no idea who the academic is referring to but he denies her this refuge when he wrests forth the evasive name: “Solas! That was it, yes. Would your friend Solas perhaps—“
“No, I don’t think Solas will be available,” Lavellan interrupts with haste.
The academic frowns. “Oh? Why—Oh, was there some sort of falling out?” Presumably given his revelation by watching as Lavellan’s face involuntarily contorts into a grimace, Kenric’s eyes widen and he immediately follows, “Ochone! The two of you weren’t— I mean, he didn’t do anything—“
“—No. To whatever you’re asking,” she cuts him off again. Since their excursion together in the Frostback Basin, she has seen Kenric only a handful of times at Orlesian museum galas and more recently during the planning stages of archeological expeditions such as this one. He requires absolutely no insight into her personal life. “I think that’s enough about that,” Lavellan finishes sharply. Perhaps too sharply—Kenric jumps and the outburst has evoked an uncomfortable hum from Josephine and a fake cough from Dorian. The affectations serve to cow the Inquisitor slightly. They’d expected better of her.
Lavellan likes to believe that she is relatively levelheaded, capable of taking stock of her emotions when confronted with difficult situations. Even a decade prior when she had been an prideful and stubborn young woman, she had doggedly attempted to employ an analytic mind and an even hand in her command of the Inquisition. Matters concerning her ex-boyfriend might prove different once the Inquisition turns to fighting Solas directly. She loathes how far he has driven her from rationality. Years have passed and Lavellan still seethes with rage, pain, and confusion.
The Inquisitor’s cheeks warm in embarrassment. She certainly has more practical excuses than guarding her broken heart for refusing to disclose how Solas is a malevolent pseudo-god and undying destroyer of worlds. That information is given strictly on a need-to-know basis, even within the ranks of the Inquisition and amongst its close allies. Among the human nobility, none suspect that the unknown puppeteer who meddles in international affairs is truly the character that inspired Dalish legend. They know he bides his time, though not for what, and they regard the shadowy figure with fear. Rather reasonably most assume he has merely adopted a name from mythology as a nom-du-guerre. Still those unfriendly to the Inquisitor are eager to suggest that Lavellan’s loyalty lies with Fen’Harel.
Gossips whisper scornfully about the jumped-up elf parading commandant through their halls with ambition unbecoming of one of her sort. She dresses in finery abjectly mismatched to her barbarian tattoos, and speaks with little deference to her betters. She cannot be trusted. The Inquisitor may parrot the Chantry’s liturgies, they say, but only to suit her political purposes. Against all things good and sacred, the Dalish wild-woman is devoted to her monster-god.
Perhaps these concerns are held honestly. Perhaps they are not. The enemies of the Inquisition in the continent’s nobility are devious and opportunistic. They already have cast suspicion on her Lavellan for her race and, despite her publicly avowed personal agnosticism, for the religious practices of her People. Her sexual liaisons need not draw their attention. Long ago during the war she kept her relationship with Solas rather private. Whispered giggles about her clear fondness for the quiet apostate, however, spread beyond Skyhold despite her best efforts. Quite naturally Solas, to his own great amusement, became in rumor the architect of a number of conspiratorial schemes.
The myriad theories ranged from the mundane (the deceitful mage seduced the naïve, stupid bumpkin in order to manipulate her into implementing his agenda—which in hindsight, Lavellan supposes, had not been far from the truth) to the absurd (the two of them were Elvish supremacists set on destroying the Chantry, crushing all the states of Thedas, and ruling the continent as king and queen) to the borderline pornographic (the middle-aged maleficar held the young Herald in bondage with blood magic as his sex-slave to indulge his sadistic carnal desires, and the top ranks of the Inquisition were trapped in an unending orgy fueled by human sacrifice). This gossip persistently made rounds each time she set foot in the courts. A seemingly benign and moderately eccentric hedge mage had inspired slanderers to conjure such fantasies based on little more than his proximity to her. None of Lavellan’s political enemies in South Thedas or Tevinter appear to have made the connection between the man who had shared the her bed and the so-called god who manipulates the continent’s goings on from the shadows.
Lavellan hopes the wretched ingrates never find the truth. The Qun knows. Lavellan has a number of planned responses to salvage her reputation if Qunari agents deploy the information to politically undermine her and cripple her designs against them. She does not know how she will handle the humiliation on a personal level.
A stilted silence has fallen over the meeting after Lavellan’s caustic interruptions to Kenric. Dorian nervously feigns another two coughs in rapid succession and the flustered Inquisitor takes the cue. It will arouse less suspicion to confirm that she and Solas had fallen out romantically: “Sorry, sorry. It’s a very personal matter—That’s really quite unprofessional of me to let it come up,” she mutters with forced regret in her voice. Kenric opens his mouth to apologize but she waves him down as she goes on, “If you need help with the translation, Dalish Keepers study to read written Elvish. I know a few people who can take a look, though they would likely be unwilling to travel that close to the Tevinter border. Even far south many of the clans have poor experiences with slavers.”
“Then maybe your Dalish colleagues could come to the University? I plan to head back to Orlais as soon as the envoys from the dig site get our supplies and our share of Chantry relics. They will likely be here within the hour.”
“Good. Drum up interest in those items, make a production about previewing what you found at the site. Everyone needs to think the mission was entirely routine. We know that the Qun has spies in the University, and we should avoid drawing attention to the translations.” She worries more about the People—Lavellan wonders how many elven janitors, cooks, couriers, and even students spy for Solas. She hates that she must harbor suspicion towards those who share her blood. “I’ll try and find Keepers or Firsts in Orlais and western Fereldan who can make the journey. Or surely I can find someone in Wycome, either from my clan or one of the others that have settled there.”
Harding pipes in, “Before we break the connection, I have to tell you—we’ve still got people posted at the dig site. We might wanna get reinforcements, what with all the researchers still there. I’m afraid the fake bandits will think the big group has their artifact, or that real bandits will come again for the Chantry relics. I’m the only one on the mission with a sending crystal, so we haven’t been in communication...I’m headed back when Professor Kenric leaves. If I can, Commander Cullen—“
“—I’ll see your request for reinforcements granted. We can discuss the details later,” the Commander says. “Anything else?”
“We also tried to move as much of Project Jackdaw as we could into hiding before the Tevinters got in like the Inquisitor told us to when she told us to come to the laboratory. We couldn’t get all of the vats of wyvern poison up and away but one of the alchemists on staff told me she set the room to make it look like we were making medicines.”
“Good work, Harding,” Lavellan says. “It should turn out all right, but Josephine, could you prepare damage control for the worst-case scenario?”
“I have some ideas for containment and a counter-narrative in mind,” the Antivan woman says with a nod.
“The Qun is watching us. The worst elements in the Magisterium are watching us.” Lavellan has found that she is a preternaturally lucky woman but does not believe that she is fortunate enough to have the timing of her wolf dreams be coincidence. The Inquisitor is not at all flattered to have her old lover’s attention: “Fen’Harel is watching us. You remember the power that the last orb like this held, and everyone we stand against certainly will too. We must maintain absolute secrecy.”
The Inquisitor has a cup of tea as she chats with her advisors after the images from the crystal blink away. It is inconvenient that Inquisition intelligence and Chantry intelligence have essentially been consolidated and all of it must be run through the Grand Cathedral in Val Royeaux, she laments. It is sad that the Inquisition has to appear as if it is operating solely as an arm of the Chantry. They exasperatedly discuss some new trouble between Fereldan and Orlais that the powers have asked the Chantry and the Inquisition, which once again has grown into more of a private army than an honor guard, to arbitrate. Josephine worries that the Tevinter professor will discover the existence and purpose of Project Jackdaw, the laboratory’s major undertaking, if he stays at the facility for much longer. Cullen shares her concern but has ideas about how to perhaps move it. When the meeting recuses itself, Cullen goes back to make plans with Harding. Josephine asks Lavellan if she intends to have anything for breakfast and offers her a lemon scone from a basket on her desk. She lies and says that she ate bread and jam on her way into the meeting. As she often does, the Inquisitor feels sick to her stomach and does not want to eat.
Lavellan forces herself to take a small walk around the courtyard. Later in the day she intends to train in the yard: though she is no longer a passable warrior exercise keeps her muscles from atrophy and makes her hungry enough to eat. The Inquisitor must remain in as good of health as she can, even when she has little energy to care for herself. She will not let the sickness win. The whole of her body has started to hurt again. That morning Lavellan had risen from her bed very early and begrudgingly dressed herself in military regalia to give a eulogy at a memorial service that some horrible person decided should be at the break of dawn and she is especially tired. Though she hardly sleeps, rousing herself from bed has become a miserable task.
It is the Anchor’s doing, even though the mark is long gone.
A phantom pain from her missing left hand sends jolting shockwaves through her whole body as she heads down the stairs of the castle’s main hall into the autumnal stretch of the castle’s inner yard. This happens periodically. The mages and alchemists who treat her do not have a solution to the lasting damage the Anchor inflicted and still inflicts on her body. The formulas for the spells that had provided her most recent reprieve from pain had come mailed in a letter from a “concerned researcher of the arcane” five years ago.
She recognized the handwriting on the letter and thinking about that still makes her angry and miserable. She is not a person who cries but reflecting on the guilt Solas seems to harbor causes a great discomfort and a great rage to well up within her, bidding tears to her eyes. How dare he ease her suffering? How dare he keep her alive? He plans to see her dead one day anyways.
Her anger at Solas does not prevent Lavellan from using what he has given to her. The dubiously sourced magic formula had been extensively researched and reverse-engineered for safety and when it was finally applied Lavellan at first thought she had been cured. But she had not been, and after half a decade its efficacy has waned. She does not think she will get any new help from her nemesis. The mages and alchemists in the Inquisition’s employ foist new treatments on her like archers emptying their quivers blindly with shots into the dark, forlornly hoping for a single arrow to take purchase in the unknown. She finds it likely that her caretakers will accidentally poison her one day. It would be a profoundly stupid accident.
The thought of dying in an accident has followed her about just behind the monster wolf all morning. The memorial service she had given in the early morning was held for a beloved drill sergeant who had retired from his post in the Inquisition earlier in the year. The old knight was thrown when his horse shied outside his family’s estate in Highever and he died when he hit his head in the fall. The man had fought alongside Loghain Mac Tir against Orlais, taken up arms and roused a makeshift regiment to join the Hero of Fereldan defending the people of Denerim against darkspawn, and had been among the first to join the Inquisition with his offer to train calvary units and lead them into battle.
The knight had galloped into fire and fury, outrunning death atop his charger. A ride on a crisp autumn day and an inconveniently placed rock had killed him. She hates how mundane that is, how grim and boring recovering the corpse must have been.
To honor the knight’s faith during her speech at the memorial service she had regurgitated some Canticle popular among the soldiers: “Blessed are those who hold faith that they walk in Our Maker’s sight. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear the summer heat; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a years of drought and its boughs stretch forth laden with fruit.” The Inquisitor does not believe in gods and feels insincere offering religious benedictions, even in her capacity as a representative of the Chantry. She truly does spit out scripture only when it suits her aims. Part of Lavellan understands and envies the comfort and courage the faithful draw from their belief. The other part of her disdains the idea of rendering one’s whole self into the hands of an unknowable Maker.
She is determined to fight her own death but she will not shrink away from it. Growing up as a wandering tribeswoman she spent her days miserable with her lot, enumerating the accidents that she could take petty thrill in avoiding—losing her footing on a ledge and plummeting to the rocks below, drowning in her armor, expiring at the end of a mercenary’s blade. Few hunters, and even fewer of those in the war party, manage to grow old, she knew, but she did not care—she chased down death for the sake of defying it, convinced she could outrun and outfight whatever came to take her. Since the Conclave much more spectacular dangers have come to threaten her life. Never for a moment did she believe fate would shield her, but never for a moment did she truly believe she would die.
Now years as a noncombatant living in pain have lead her to fear that one day she may simply lie down and not be able to rise again. Lavellan hates the idea and does not plan on staying down. She thinks of her own mother settling in to a bed of wildflowers, knowing well she was going to her rest.
If the Maker has turned his sights from the world and the Creators are locked away, she need not resign herself to their plans for accidents or comply with any date of expiration they’ve placed on her body. Not even the Creator that still walks the earth will spell her end. The Dread Wolf has a thousand eyes set to watch her every move, but she will certainly not be resigning herself to his plans. Lavellan will not die until she is ready to.
The Inquisitor saunters around the courtyard and pays pleasantries to those she sees. A bright mottle of red and yellow has taken over the leaves of the trees and the climbing ivy and the autumn air is fresh and brisk. Dagna the Arcanist is out from the undercroft to help inspect a shipment of rune components with the quartermaster and she waves happily at her boss. Lavellan listens in on a meeting between creature researchers Minaeve and Helisma and the retired Dennet’s replacement where they are trying to determine how to best domesticate and saddle the common wyvern. It’s a busy day in the small marketplace flourishing in the courtyard, and many shopkeepers come to her bundled in their fine jackets to show her their goods. There’s a stall from a bakery at the village that has sprung up outside the castle gates down the mountain, and Lavellan manages to get down the sample of a pear tart offered to her.
Despite the activity the castle seems empty to Lavellan. She misses the friends she made on her old adventures—Cassandra and Varric and their constant bickering, Sera’s silly pranks. Rainier intently carving horses and griffins out of wood scraps in the stables, and Vivienne watching over the Grand Hall from her perch on the mezzanine. She thinks of Cole hiding away like a ghost, sneaking bright apples from the kitchen and placing them on the desks of overworked clerks, and of the Iron Bull sitting in the tavern with one big hand on flustered Dorian’s shoulder and the other raising his drink aloft in a toast. Lavellan still sees them all from time to time but rarely in Skyhold and never together.
After her walk she returns to the castle and begins the ascent up the stairs to her quarters. It is an almost punishing climb some days. The Inquisitor’s life seems much less epically heroic than it had once been. She mostly plays politics and pushes papers, and today will be no exception to her settled routine. There are a number of procurement plans the Commander and the Quartermaster have put together for her to review. Papers wait for her above, piled high on her desk. Surveys for development. Spy dossiers put together by Charter. A number of supposedly personal letters she must respond to for the sake of politics. Pleas for her support in petty fights over secession. Tending to optics—she must offset whispers that she has slowly undone the work of the Exalted Council’s limitations of her power especially because they are by and large true. She needs the advantages and the reach.
A good number of the continent’s political elite despise her and fear her. “That cunning elf,” they’ll call her, cursing her like she’s raided their cupboards for their dining sets and made off with the good silver. Though she has no problem lying through her teeth, especially to people she loathes, she keeps her dealings excruciatingly fair. It is a tactical decision and not a moral stance: she will not give anyone the satisfaction of exposing her as a cheat before all of Thedas. Among the commoners elves can be folk heroes if they feature in good tavern songs. She is still remembered as a savior and held in high regard by the smallfolk. Their fidelity is a protection she will not cede easily, and she will does her best to leave no evidence that might cause them to believe that she is uncouth and grasping in her dealings.
Lavellan’s shoulders tense and sore under the straps of her prosthetic arm and it weighs heavy, but she will not remove it even if she spends the next few hours alone in her chambers. Allowing herself to undress would begin the slow and steady slide to sleeping during the day, she is sure. She has to be stressed for it to irk her so early in the day. She rubs the juncture between her prosthetic arm and her real one just below her elbow. Under her regalia, jointed metal runners help stabilize and offset the weight of the fake hand, and leather straps run up the remainder of her limb to a pad capping her shoulder that is secured to the rest of her body by leather straps that wrap around her torso. Dwarven craftsmen in Orzammar had designed and built her arm on special order for her and the thing has some utility. The fingers and wrists are jointed and opposable if she adjusts them with her good hand, and the grip is strong enough to hold things like papers or wine glasses.
Though anger does her no good Lavellan still grows angry with Solas whenever she thinks of her prosthetic. It is his fault that her appendage is now made of inert and lifeless metal. She supposes it is also his fault that she lives in a castle and is now only slightly less powerful than the Empress of Orlais or the Archon of Tevinter.
Stairs can be slow and lend time to thought for Lavellan. Some days her memories of Solas feel so distant that he seems entirely abstract, like he is no longer a man made of flesh and blood, and had never been at all. Other days his presence inundates Lavellan’s dreams and her recollections of him grow stronger and her trickle of remaining love for him swells forth in great currents and bursts forth within her heart like a river overrunning its banks. It’s sickening and painful. She has never hated herself before but she is filled with a deep self-loathing each time she feels the pang of lingering affection for her silly old man rising in her chest.
Sometimes the tinge of amour coloring her memories of him with familiar hues ebbs away and Lavellan thinks of him as he truly is: incomprehensible and monumental in all his horrid ways. When she puts her mind to it, Lavellan cannot fathom Solas or his works. In her recollections he seems a man like any other, but even if he is truly a mortal elf as he claims he must be a different order of being. There is no such thing as a god, but Lavellan is sickened that Solas bears close resemblance to one. While he has lived, civilizations have risen from the dust and fallen back into the same. Seas have claimed mountains, multitudinous trees have risen from seeds to stretch into forests great and vast, and fertile marshy planes have parched into unforgiving deserts. Solas has destroyed an entire world, and in erecting the Veil he warped the architecture of the universe and the nature of reality itself. He soon intends to do so again—though he may want for power now, the very mechanics of the universe have served as his playthings.
And she has served as his plaything. The Inquisitor has convinced herself that Solas was incapable of loving her in the same capacity she loved him. She does not doubt that he had been in some way fond of her, perhaps only as an erstwhile source of physical pleasure. He is, after all, corporeal. Even if Solas had thought she was “real,” whatever that meant, Lavellan is still despicably small compared to him. Could one love a creature whose life might span a mere blink? That lacked entirely one’s higher faculties?
Men and women are often fond of pets and infants but they cannot delight in knowing them innately or admire them as an equal. Lavellan’s arrogance and narcissism roil when she thinks of how at best Solas must have regarded her as some darling simple thing.
At least her arrogance and narcissism prevent her from giving in to despair. She reminds herself he cannot be that powerful and all-knowing, as he seems to have made no discernible process tearing down the Veil over the course of a decade. Some part of her thinks she can stop him. A foolish and childish part of her thinks that she can save him, even while maintaining that she may as well be an insect before him. Even if she is an insect, she will not stand to humble herself.
Solas is a scheming madman who has made it clear that he intends for the world to burn. The creep skulks in the form of a wolf around the periphery of her dreams, pressing paw prints in the phantom snow and sounding forlorn howls in the hoary distance. She used to howl back that he should go fuck himself. He never answered and she has long since given up screaming her hatred at him. Lavellan wonders why he visits her. It certainly isn’t from forlorn amour. Maybe he is trying to drive her mad. Maybe he is surveilling her. The lupine silhouette lopes with its head held low and its glowing eyes cast down, even as they are fixed upon her. He seems so miserable, and Lavellan hates it. When they last spoke Solas claimed to harbor some contrition about his horrid ends, but that means little to Lavellan. She has hunted with elves who lamented killing rabbits even as they neared full traps to snap the animals’ necks.
While he commends his mind to haunting her dreams, Solas must lay his head somewhere. The Inquisition has found and stormed bases of his spy rings’ operations but has never turned up any trace of Solas himself other than his handwriting on documents or in magical formulas scrawled in chalk across walls. She wonders where he calls home. She wonders where he is. Lavellan does not expect to have that question answered any time soon, let alone when she reaches the top of the stairs leading up into her bedchamber.
Solas steps out from behind her desk and he stands before the Inquisitor with his hands folded behind his back. His posture is both gentle and menacing as he regards her in the flesh for the first time in six years. “Inquisitor. I’m glad to see you well,” Solas greets in his kindly way and Lavellan feels her blood drain from her face as the rest of her body goes straight and rigid. The mid-morning autumn sun pours through the big windows that reach from the floor to the ceiling of the bedchamber and Lavellan looks upon her old lover and as quiet settles between them, she decides she must have gone mad. The light casts its illumination across Solas’s bald head and it catches in his reddish eyelashes and fills the soft lines of aging on his face, giving the man an almost ethereal glow.
Solas’s gaze lingers as it catches Lavellan’s own. His grey eyes seem almost a pale lilac in the bright light and fixed before them Lavellan buzzes with an almost cervine energy and awareness. She has come face to face with her wolf and at once she is terrified and exhilarated. Despite her visceral reaction to his presence she is a warrior and she does not waver. Solas gives a small hum that seems both terribly happy and unbearably sad. Politely, Solas offers his apology: “Please pardon my intrusion. For the sake of time, I thought it might be best to speak with you in person.”