“You have met other Dreamers?” Curiosity springs from grief, welling from the places his heart aches the most. He allows it to flow, knowing it would please Wisdom to see it fostered. The pall of despair which hovers in his head does not allow him to think as he ought to. He feels sluggish, wit dulled to a smooth edge as he tries to recall what he knows of modern Dreamers. Names occur to him, all Tevinter in sound. Even the best-known name for his kind, somniari, is theirs.
He can claim he has never met another, and perhaps that is the more believable claim, even if it is a lie. Solas stops just short of the assertion.
“We are few in number. Those of us who do not fall prey to the Chantry itself often fall to its rhetoric.” Its influence has touched the mind of every mage he had met in this age, apostate or no. Solas pauses, eyes drawn to Erenan’s face by the fingers that lie against it. Falon’Din’s blood weaves its way across his cheeks, inked with memories he is not privy to, though it gives him cause to think twice about his words. To wonder, briefly, if he already knew said dangers all too well.
“It is an unenviable position, I am sorry you’ve known it, too.”
“It is a common position.” Long practice keeps his tone neutral, where it might have waxed bitter: death is all too common now, with the lives of their kind cut so outrageously short by the same blade which severed the physical world from the Fade. Many are those who grieve. “Yet grief makes islands of us all, distant and adrift. I thought only to visit yours while it drifted close to my own.”
And perhaps, Erenan realizes slowly, there is more than a grain of truth in that; perhaps that may be why he risked approaching Solas at all - there are few in this Veil-torn world who can be said to understand the very particular grief of mourning an entire world, an entire empire, an entire way of life, lost. Preserved only in dreams... and with few dreamers left to remember it.
A pity he didn’t dare speak of it.
“There are those among the Dalish who dream as you do,” he says instead, knowing it to be true: rare, but true. A weak, wandering sort of Dreamer: less a walker of the paths, and more a ship only slightly less adrift than others, yet the skill itself remains. “Though few in number, and often... untutored. They spoke of spirits as teachers and guides, rather than friends.”
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