#*names though?* Thematic NAMES? i am slowly losing my marbles

[aroaceleovaldez]

the secret thing they don’t tell you about making roughly ~200 roman demigod characters is that it’s all well and good until you have to come up with 200 names.

[5lazarus]

#29 "if one of us sinned it must be God", your choice of what to do with it?

I cannot tell you how much I love the prompt list you made. Collected Works got lost in the mail, so I ordered To Axion Esti. Very excited to read! I’m thinking about going through all 40 prompts and writing each of them as a moment from Solas’ revolution, so here is the first. I posted it to AO3 here, there is no ithaca--I was rereading C.P. Cavafy’s poem “The City” and thinking about Solas and Arlathan, as I am wont to do, and decided to use that as my thematic base. because when I am not writing about a city? but without further adore, the story itself: “if one of us sinned it must be God.”Humiliation comes easy to a son of Arlathan. Solas goes limp and lets the vallaslin take control, shuntling self deep behind his eyes where even Mythal cannot see. He knows he is not wrong. She bends his knee and he stares steadily at the ground. His eyes do not burn. His lips do not contort into a snarl. Mythal shapes him into genteel obedience, as a reminder of what they are. She forces him. He resists gently. The punishment will be worse than this. He would punish himself worse, if he let her see his eyes.

“Even my own Pride kneels humbled before me,” Mythal chuckles. Hesitant laughter murmurs through the galley: he may be humbled today, but back at her side tomorrow. They all know this, especially him. He traces sigils in the mosaics, cold beneath his hands. They dance geometric before his eyes, and he wonders at the shapes into which they contort. He has dissected an elf’s eye before, assisting Ghilan’nain. What collection of minuscule muscular contortions make this? How can he replicate it? He tells himself: this is what I shall remember. Mythal’s grim smile and the uneven marble tesserae cutting into my minds, and I shall permutate the perspective until I can meet my own eyes again. He tests the charm quietly, tensing the muscles in his feet, but he cannot rise. Mythal still has him bound.

Andruil says wearily, “Really, Mother, is this necessary? Let him rise, and lick his wounds, and come back all the brighter tomorrow. We have work to do.” She flourishes a hand, so the light catches in her lyrium-gauntlet. He sees the red reflected in her shadow. Reflexively he shudders but he cannot, Mythal has him in place, and the horror comes to his eyes and Solas quashes it fiercely, because though he is bound, he still has his own pride, and he will not let Mythal corrupt his nature. She made him like this. He will not let her break him too. Mythal is amused. “Fine,” she says. She has made her point: the war against the dwarves will continue, and those pressed into the Evanuris’ service will stay their servants. There may be freedom for their grandchildren, down the line: so Solas’ own children, if he has any, will be born free. But the soldiers are bound to Elvhenan, and Mythal will not free them so long as Elvhenan needs them--and that includes binding her own Pride to Elvhenan’s will, however humbling it may be. The vallaslin sinks back into his skin, almost invisible, and slowly he rises. Expressionless he gazes upon Mythal. He thinks, your Pride shall be your downfall. He says the words he has rehearsed so often before, “Hail Mythal, adjudicator and savior! She has struck down the pillars of the earth and rendered their demesne unto the People! Praise her name forever!" Mythal smiles unpleasantly. “Enough of that, Dread Wolf. I have mastered my Pride. I do not need to see you grovel.” “I merely recite fact,” Solas says. “Fact you have had me say many a time before, and that I will repeat for any audience.” There is no point in staying. She will not listen to reason. This lyrium-sickness will drive them mad and wrap their minds right into that bizarre hivemind of the Titans. The Evanuris will not compromise. His people have sealed the road to the Titan, and he has been punished for it. He has taken liberties that were never his, enslaved to the will of Mythal, to guard those she does not consider her children. He holds the anger in the pit of his stomach and keeps his face blank. Mythal says, “See that you do. You may leave, Dread Wolf. You have sinned but you have been forgiven. Return to celebrate the spoils of our next campaign. I will not see you before then.” Solas thinks, I don’t want to see you before then, what makes you think I am so eager for punishment? I am not like Andruil, still slavering for a kind word. I have my own people to attend to--and yours. He cannot help but utter a short laugh as he bows his head. Smiling grimly to himself, he leaves, conscious of the court’s attention, and he cannot help but throw his shoulders back and walk as tall as he would after a battle bloodlessly won. His pride is smarting. He will lick his wounds, and recover. He walks back to his office and takes the eluvian back to his official household, where he removes the golden armor of Fen’Harel that he is really growing too old for, and changes to more comfortable clothes. He debates the utility of doing something dramatic with his hair, where gray is beginning to pepper at the temples. Restlessly he goes into his bedroom and packs a bag, thinking that he can go anywhere, slip away to another quarter of the city, where he can be yet another of the All-Mother’s slaves, and struggle to pay his rent and his tithe as he works a job marginally more satisfying than managing a losing war. He would like to paint. In another world, perhaps, he was never given that promotion, and returned to Arlathan not in Mythal’s own triumph, but as a weary footsoldier, seeking his allotment from the temple guards. He laughs. A slave’s life, regardless: he cannot imagine a reality in which he is not defined by the will that is Mythal. Then Wisdom says, “Look at yourself, Pride. You dressed yourself blindly. A costume can change but you remain the same.” He had not heard them creep behind him. He looks up at them and they smile, mirroring his face without the binding. Grief seizes him and he turns away, tears prickling at his eyes. He sits back on his bed and puts his head in his hands. Wisdom freely given can feel cruel. He thinks, I thought I had grown too old for this. “I envy you,” Solas says. “That you may take my shape without my obligations. That you are free from the will of Mythal. That your nature remains incorrupt.” He touches the vallaslin at his cheeks. He remembers fighting off the priests when they restrained him, as a boy. He remembers refusing to submit to the will that is Mythal. He bit one--his father had been horrified. They still branded him. He remembers the way that it burned. Wisdom is quiet. They sit next to them. He listens to them mimic his breathing. Outside the window the city seethes. Night is falling and there are plenty of places to go, a friend of his has a gallery opening tonight, and then there is the little cafe opened by a man from the Tirashan who sings exquisitely, and of course he has the dispatches to attend to, little favors to dispense, and his friends to consult about this latest humiliation. Wisdom says, “What makes you corrupt?” “The will of Mythal,” Solas says immediately, and then pauses. “The will that is Mythal. Obeying and disobeying. Either way is wrong.” He smiles ruefully. “I have sinned and I have been forgiven and I will be welcomed back to the fold, only to sin and be forgiven and welcomed back to the fold once more. According to the will that is Mythal. Because her Pride must be mastered.” “What makes you obey?” they say. Solas says bitterly, “Habit and the vallaslin. Blood calls to blood.” Sick shame and anger rush him, and his fingers claw at the quit under them; and then he breathes through the pain, as he has been taught, and the feeling of humiliation subsides into rawness rather than burning. Wisdom says, “What makes you disobey?” Solas looks at them askance. “Because I will not blindly follow orders that will get myself and my people killed. I will not commit workers who expect me to protect them to those mines. I will not let the Evanuris’ greed destroy us all. The vallaslin may bind me, but it does not command me. I will save the elvhen people, even from their own false gods.” Wisdom smiles, and Solas looks into the face that is so like how his own could be, unmarred by the vallaslin. “Then you have it,” they say. “You know your path. Walk it. Mythal gave you manumission, even if she did not give you your will.” “I cannot remove the vallaslin,” he says, amused. Wisdom loses its definition slightly, so Solas knows they disagree, even if they will not vocalize it. “What?” “You say you cannot remove the vallaslin,” they say. “But you also say that it does not command you. Then why do you let it define your face? You are limiting yourself, Solas. Why?” Solas says, only to fill the space, “You have given me much to think about.” It is unthinkable that the vallaslin can be removed, but he wants it gone. He has rarely circumscribed his desires before--it was unthinkable that a slave could become an evanuris, after all, but that did not stop him from steadily rising through the ranks. He rises and catches sight of himself in the mirror in the corner of his room, plainly attired, Mythal’s vallaslin burnt as prominent on his face as ever. He strokes the lines they burnt onto his chin, wondering what he would look like without it. He imagines himself without it, no longer resigned to the easy humiliations of Mythal’s service, and he sees, in a glance, the possibility. A shiver traces down his spine as Wisdom leaves the room and he is left standing before the mirror, thinking rapidly the chain of spells born in the blood and how they can be undermined, chipped away at, worn away like a river against the stone. He has brought down mountains and decapitated the heart of the Stone. What is stopping him now? When there is possibility, there is pride. Solas raises his head and meets his own gaze in the mirror and knows, suddenly, that his only master is his Pride, and that cannot be mastered.