The hymn echoes through the mountain pass, held aloft by beliefs sincerely held. To Solas its words are unfamiliar, as foreign to him as anything in this new world, but its meaning resonates, perhaps too well. The herald held her shoulders close to her as they sang, unsure what to make of adulation she had never asked for, yet certain of the path that lies ahead. There was trust in her eyes as they conversed beside bottle blue flames, trust he finds himself coveting, despite the deception.
He sits alone, now, his magic spent from the battle behind them, unable to contribute to mending the wounded, his heart too raw to place himself amongst his companions. If Cole’s sudden appearance surprises him, it does not show on his face. The same cannot be said of his questions, which tear at him, prying into questions he had asked and dismissed. Pointed ears pin back against his skull, answers running through his head too fast to voice.
“That is not my name,” he says, the gentle quality of his voice belying the ice that runs through him. An old, used-up name, never truly his to begin with. To hear the Dalish speak it is like hearing a stranger’s name, but in Cole’s voice it sounds like a ghost’s. “Nor is it my word.” Lethallen had come so simply to him, rolling off his tongue, but dropped like a stone through empty air when he last spoke it aloud. To him, it had meant everything, and to the world, nothing. In his companion’s face, he had beheld something– hard to place without the Fade to buoy feelings to the surface and impossible to tell if it was what he had seen, or what he had wanted to see. After, he wondered if he had imagined saying it. If he had imagined it all.
“There is no simple answer to the question you’ve asked me. Little in this world is easy to place, reality is simultaneously tenuous and too heavy to bear, yet I find myself wanting it all the same.”
COLE’S EXPRESSION SHIFTS into something of confusion and vague frustration as he processes Solas' words— a name that isn't his, yet it's scrawled all over the inside of his skull like a warning.
He'll let it go for the moment. If only to draw a deep breath and push at something else.
"Things are only so tangled because you tangle them. Simplicity was here, you just didn't see it as an option. You needn't weigh every thing you desire to figure if it's something you should desire. You are allowed! Why deny yourself everything but the bare? Is that living? "
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