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iridescentnuances · 3 days

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idk just some DAI Solavellan stuff. Solas POV, 2.6k, Mature.

Three hours of pensive searching and troubled wandering had finally borne fruit.

Ellana had been impossible to find since their tumultuous arrival at Skyhold, a habit which had become her silent protest against what she could not change or control. Solas understood, but he knew it was not merely suffering that drove her away. It was also spite and anger, two emotions she felt perhaps more deeply than even he realized. At first he had thought her reticence was merely distrust.

Now that they were acquainted, he could see instead the rage that fueled her silence and stubbornness, the hatred she bore towards the Chantry that had made an icon and a prisoner of her.

He had no doubt that Leliana had an idea of where the newly-christened Inquisitor was, but she and the spymaster had an odd understanding. He hadn’t intended to overhear Ellana taking her own life hostage to make a point to Leliana, but it had deepened his understanding of her. Solas had little doubt Ellana would in fact kill herself if they tried to drive her too far.

There was a selfishness in her he abhorred, but a desperation he understood.

Unfortunately, to find her forced a contemplative stroll through the ruins of what had been built over Tarasyl’an Te’las. It was foreign enough to dull that distant pain, but every now and again there would be a sign. A piece of Elvhen statuary shattered into gravel, visible only due to its material, hints of older stonework at the base of some walls. The bones of an ancient dragon encased in stone formed long after its death.

She was atop the walls, in the center of an intact section bounded by shattered stonework; a destination with no easy path to reach it.

A tower kept it from view, but he had heard the sounds of metal on stone in the distance, giving her position away. After navigating the crumbled stonework to the top, she came into view at last. The way between them was treacherous, a long section of fallen wall caved by ancient siege weaponry, no doubt. It was tumbled into a pile, some of which had fallen down the side of the cliff.

She sat on the intact wall beyond it, her back to Solas, a campfire lighting her silhouette. Tendrils of deep mahogany hair were pulled free of her messy braid, streaming in the cold wind that blew past; the only signs of motion from her. He knew instantly why she had gone silent and still.

Better to simply admit his approach, then, since she knew he was coming. “Were you intending to stay all night, I wonder?”

In one fluid movement, she rose. Her limbs unfolded, and then extended, arms stretching over her head until she stopped, short and sharp with a wince. The left elbow again, he imagined. The fingers stretched wide over her head towards the evening sky curled in, hands balling into fists as her arms fell like dead weight to her sides. Turning on her toes, she faced him at last.

Her impenetrable, sharp-jawed face was calm, eyes dark with their current distance and the light behind her.

Wide lips pursed minutely as she walked to the edge of the wall, the crumbling gap and the tempestuous mountain wind between them.

“I am displeased to see you, falon. You should take care. If you keep pestering me on word of the Andrastians, I may begin to think of you in the same light.”

“The only curiosity I sate is my own, lethallan,” he said, ignoring her return to sarcastic formality.

A grim smile touched her lips, but not her cold voice. “Not going to fetch me for Cassandra this time?”

“No. I asked that she no longer involve me.”

Her expression was bland and unreadable, but her eyes were alight with a gleam of curiosity. “Why?”

“In light of your considerable and ever-increasing quarrel with the Chantry, I have decided to alienate them rather than you,” Solas replied, rather than lying to her. She accepted lies without question, but counted them, and he had already lied to her more than he was comfortable with. Every lie compounded, and renewed scrutiny might see things he would rather not be seen.

Finally she smiled, half-hearted and rueful, shaking her head. “Your placation skills are as impressive as ever. Don’t feed me medicine and tell me it’s honey, Solas.”

“It was a great unkindness, what Leliana did.”

Her smile faded away, and the light left her eyes. “I’m tired of shouting over the wind. Find your way across or go away,” she said, turning on her heel and returning to her fire. He could see the frustration in her sharp steps, in the way she threw herself down on the stones.

By now he knew that his struggling might amuse her, but it would garner no sympathy or softening of her attitude. And so, rather than making a show of attempting the dangerous climb, a feat which would be simple for her, he made the trek simple for himself as well. Using magic, of course.

Whatever occupied her continued to, and he knew it wasn’t merely a show of ignoring him.

Crossing the ruined wall was completed in a heartbeat, and as she was watching he didn’t bother to reduce his ability down to a spell she might recognize and accept. Ellana seemed intensely familiar with magic, he’d cast before without a staff in the midst of a fight and he’d seen her discreetly checking his hands for injuries at camp. Which he’d had, of course. Some singed fingertips were a small sacrifice to his facade.

Not that she had any herself, but unlike the humans she treated it as something unremarkable as lighting a fire with flint and steel.

“Mac na galla,” she cursed under her breath, in a language he recognized but did not understand.

Something from the Free Marches, which made sense considering her origin.

As he came close, able to see over her shoulder, he could see what she was doing. A small, rectangular metal box rested next to her knee, an array of tools and half-finished pieces spread before her. Resting in the heart of her fire was a small crucible approximately the size of a teapot, which was filled with melted metal. The source of her curse seemed to be a shorn nail, which had torn the delicate skin underneath, leaving a thin, ragged piece of nail behind at the edge. It was bleeding, but she’d apparently already dismissed that injury, tossing a piece of her nail aside and picking up a half-finished arrowhead.

Having just been unmolded, it was rough and covered in burrs from its casting. She picked up a file and began working at them, barely moving as he circled the fire to sit across from her. There was a flicker of a sidelong glance, but nothing else.

She had obliquely invited him to stay, and so he had no qualms about interrupting what was obviously some form of meditation. Self-soothing, perhaps, or simply a repetitive task to help clear her mind. The Inquisition had plenty of arrows.

“Your finger is bleeding. Might I assist?”

“Bleeding cleanses the body,” she muttered, which was entirely untrue.

“I am fairly certain all that bleeding accomplishes, in most cases, is to relieve you of your blood.”

“You can do some blood magic with it if you want,” she said, finger dripping onto her thigh as she filed down a spike of pebbled iron from the edge of the arrowhead. It was a narrow, pyramidal one, of the type she tended to use against templars.

“I will abstain. Was it you that left the basket in my tent? If so, thank you– it is exactly what I was in search of.”

“The mountain pine trees have good bark for weaving. The inner bark, not the outer. The outer makes excellent fire-starters, especially if you can find a pitch-knot. If you soak their cone-buds in honey for six months, strain, boil, and then ferment it, it makes something called melash, I think, but we just called it pine wine. I learned it from a Frostback clan during the Arlathvhen.”

He had to admit, privately, that at times her presumption that he was an ignorant, helpless scholar that needed to be taught everything did grate. On the other hand, in his company she was completely free with her speech, manner, and all of those vicious bristling edges she hid from everyone else. She treated him, for better or worse, like she would any Dalish despite their disagreements about her people. With one glaring difference– Ellana habitually acted as if he was a bird fallen out of a nest, something pitiable and fragile.

At least he had proven he knew how to forage, which had quelled her fears that he was three seconds from starving to death at all times.

Her concern was amusing, but knife-edged and imperious. He knew it by now intimately, and no longer felt any arrogance in it. She simply knew no other way to show people that she cared. Not with her guard up constantly.

She and Sera were constantly at odds due to it, which was amusing to witness.

Solas sat in quiet, contemplative silence, watching as she finished the arrowhead and moved to the next.

The metal box split in half, width-wise, revealing an interior packed with damp sand. She pressed it back into each disheveled half, leaving it flat, and then carefully pressed her new arrowhead into the surface. Then the box was closed over the arrowhead, to force its impression into the sand.

It was calming to watch her, scarred, graceful hands moving with authority and purpose, not a moment’s hesitation to impede her work. He could imagine her as she doubtless had been, doing this exact same thing at a thousand firesides, during a thousand nights, small practiced movements as intricate as a dance and just as full of beautiful artistry. The arrow was removed from the mold, and she set it atop her left knee, perched for later use.

The mold closed again, with a small reed caught between the halves to leave an opening for the metal to pour into the cavity. The metal glowed, a sullen fiery hue, as she used a small metal ladle with a spout to scoop up the molten iron and tipped it into the mold. The arc of magma-hot liquid iron was transfixing, despite the brevity of the moment.

She set the mold aside to cool, and lifted her narrowed eyes back to his face. “You heard her threaten me. You heard me threaten her.” It was a statement, not a question, so he waited until she continued. “You must be disappointed again that I had to be forced into the role they have chosen for me instead of happily sacrificing myself to save Thedas like a good little icon. So please, tell me how selfish I am for attempting to choose my manner of death. Make certain to be abstruse, or I won’t know how smart you are.”

“Yet again I am scolded for preferring specificity in my speech. Lethallan, were I to write a treatise on you, it would be filled with contradictions.”

Solas was pleased to see her smile, sly and barely-stifled. Still, he hadn’t quite spoken his thoughts, which was what he had come here to do. It was a faint hope that his words– marred by secrecy and a thousand lies– would do any good to comfort her, but he could try.

“It need not end in death, Ellana.”

“It will,” she replied placidly, staring into the fire. “One way or another, it will. To be raised up is to be chiseled down, the pieces of yourself that are inconvenient, or wrong, or too uncomfortable removed from you. By force, if necessary, and by history, inevitably. Whatever survives this will not be me, if anything does.”

She looked up at him, eyes reflecting the molten metal, gleaming like a predator in the night.

“I am already dead, Solas, I’ve told you. I can feel them killing me.”

It was too matter-of-fact for dramatics, the words laden with a hard-won weariness and resignation that gave them a vicious certainty.

“If you can think of any wisdom, any wisdom at all that will make this burden lighter for me, then speak. But until the day I do not feel my back breaking under the weight of their expectations every time they look at me, this is where you will find me. But eventually…” She reached over and knocked open the mold, pulling a jagged arrowhead from it. Lifting it, Ellana shifted her gaze over to it, gently spinning the metal in her fingers. “Eventually there will be nothing of me left. But there is no sympathy for me, no. Because I am a thing, a beacon, a hand and not the woman connected to it.”

She turned the arrowhead one last time, and then tipped it towards him. He could see the flaw in the metal, a hollow that had not filled properly during the casting. It was thrown back into the crucible, his eyes tracking it, watching the metal begin to soften at the edges as it gave in to the heat.

“Would it make for a better tragedy for me to be hopeful, Solas? To rail against the very sky, to stand up against an ancient magister like a child flinging stones at a giant? Would that make it sad enough? How pathetic must I be? How humbled? Tell me, Solas. What form of martyr must I be?”

There was no answer that was both kind and true. “Ir abelas, my friend.”

Ellana laughed, soft and hollow, graceful, able hands limp in her lap. “Are you disappointed in me?”

“No,” he said quietly, “I am not.”

The wind whistled past them as the conversation fell silent.

Fading from the edges of the sky, the day finally ended, leaving them in a circle of firelight with the darkness all around them. Ellana made no move to craft another arrows, busy, helping hands unable to do anything to lighten her burdens. The guilt he felt in that moment eclipsed, even for a moment, the shield wall of duty and distance that kept him focused on his goals.

They had always felt small, these vestiges of the Elvhen, but at this moment he felt as overwhelmed by inevitability and grief as she did.

In this moment they were joined, and equal.

Victims of his grief.

“I’ve been thinking about when we spoke of your dreams. Your Fade journeys. It was some time ago, when–”

“I remember,” Solas said quietly.

“Not even the spirits will really remember me as I am, but as whatever they make of me,” she said with a small, faint laugh. “Somehow that makes it all worse.”

“I will share my memories of you," he said, an odd, uncomfortably impulsive promise. It was no burden to make, of course, but it came with an emotion that must be ignored. Thrust aside. "Such as they are."

"Unflattering?" she joked grimly, and shook her head, leaving a smear of char on her forehead as she pushed her hair away. "The truth often is unflattering, Solas. You have ink on your chin."

Hastily he reached up to lick his thumb and wipe it away, her tired laugh easing some of the tension in the air. When he glanced up, she was smiling at him, and her eyes were clearer. Less heavy.

"Will you tell me a story?"

"I would be glad to," he assured her quietly.

And he did- ensuring it was a story with no villains, no struggle, and most importantly, no heroes.

There had been enough tragedy already.

#cuuuuuute #love how he's tiptoeing around her #also #the game really should have tackled the whole dehumanization of the inquisitor better #solavellan #psalacanthea's fics

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