So I don’t normally post things. I’ve only recently gotten back into tumblr after a few years, so I have no friends. But I’ve been lurking in the Solavellan section and I have to say, I am impressed. So... it’s 2 AM and I’m back in Solavellan Hell. Just when I though I was over that egg...
His eyes darted up as the air caught in his throat.
Idly, she thought that his eyes might just pop out at the sight of her, widening as shock and panic flashing across his expression. It would have been amusing in any other situation.
The air was thick with magic and ash, blood and fire. War raged behind her, between the races of Thedas and the remnants of the Elvhen, the armies of two different worlds clashing like the tide crashes against rock, screams and snarls filling the air as blades glimmered slick with red, the elements raged across the field, crackling with hatred and energy.
Standing above it all was the ancient Elvhen ruin upon which she now stood, across from the man who had taken everything from her and given nothing in return. It had been a long war, waged in the shadows for years, only to erupt into unstoppable chaos in every city and street across Thedas, like a spark of flame to gaatlock. She fought alongside allies old and new, pushing ever forward for the salvation of their world, sacrificing everything they had for the promise of tomorrow. And yet, they were losing.
Solas stood atop the dais of what was once a great hall, the throne missing, the ceiling long gone, the walls crumbling to the ground, and still he appeared to be a king among men. Despite falling into disrepair, the dais rose above the ground around them, above the mountain, overlooking the world that spread out like a canvas around them. The highest point on the mountain, practically scrapping the heavens.
He knew she was not here to stop him. It was already too late for that. He gripped the foci between his hands, glued to his palms as magic unleashed into a column of light that soared up into the skies, ripping the veil at the seams.
The ritual had already begun, and there was no stopping it, not even if he wanted to.
"You shouldn't be here, vhenan."
Though he attempted to keep his voice calm and controlled, she heard it waver. Anyone else might have missed how his voice cracked at the last word, lost in the roar of battle and magic that filled the world around them, but she had always had exceptional hearing.
"You are going to destroy my world." She said to him, her face completely expressionless, her voice firm but did not give away any clue as to her purpose there. "Why would I not be here?"
She caught the way his carefully crafted mask cracked, one of many, close to shattering at this point. She always could read him with unnerving accuracy, as if she was reading his mind rather than his face.
He felt naked in front of her, bared of all his secrets. Even before she had learned the truth, she had known that he was hiding something, suspected that he was more than he appeared to be, that he played a bigger role in the war to come than he admitted. She teased and laughed with him while ferreting out his tells, making him slip, catching every slip of the tongue and crack in the mask before he could cover up.
His eyes stared at her pleadingly, but she remained unfazed, her back straight, shoulders squared, standing as proudly as the queen she should have been.
"You cannot stop me, vhenan." He told her, steeling his voice.
There was no magic left in this world powerful enough to overcome the spell he had cast, the very air around him swirling with raw, uncontrolled magic that would consume anyone that got too close to him.
"I know." She stated simply, continuing to stand across form him, just outside of the wards he had set up to keep her people from interrupting his ritual. She was in her soldier's stance, legs braced apart, hand and prosthetic clasped behind her back, chin held up as she met his gaze without flinching.
The wind whipped around them angrily, howling as it carried the screams and moans of the dying. He could not fathom why she had chosen to be here, watching helplessly, rather than on the battlefield next to her comrades, killing as many of his own men as they could before the inevitable end.
"Then why are you here?" He finally asked her.
"Your men tried to stop me." She told him. "Stop me from reaching you. From being here." She glanced around at the crumbling walls and the green column of light piercing the sky above. "But they did not try to kill me."
"Instead, they tried to goad me into fighting them. Pointless battles meant to distract rather than kill." She continued, catching him with a penetrating look, eyes narrowed. "You did not want me here."
"Of course not, vhenan –"
"You have no right to call me that anymore."
Silence stretched between them.
He watched her with a growing ache in his chest, his heart withering at the sight of her now, eyes bright and wild as they always were in battle, her braids coming undone, blood staining her cheek. Yet despite the crimson sheen of her weapons she had remained untouched in battle, a testament to her skills considering how hard it was to kill his Elvhen. In another world, she would have been a god as well.
He sighed. "Of course I did not want you here. I told you, I would not have you see what I become –"
Her mask slipped for a second, a small, bitter smile gracing her lips as she looked up at him and he glimpsed the love that still burned within her. By the gods, it almost ruined him right there.
"You wanted me out of the way. Out of sight." She let out a harsh bark of laughter. "Coward. You just didn't want to watch me die."
She was right, of course. He knew that destroying the veil would destroy her world, and thus, herself. But he thought that despite the pain that the knowledge would cause him, if she were far away and out of sight, he could bear it. Pretend, even, that she might somehow survive.
She shakes her head at him slowly, an expression of dark amusement on her face. "I will not allow you such mercy, Solas."
And oh, how he loved the way his name rolled off her tongue. He closed his eyes and savored the moment, imagining those familiar lips calling his name, whispering, laughing, sighing. Solas.
"If you are going to kill me, you are going to watch." She continued, her voice steady, expression calm, accepting her death. It tore him apart.
"Vhenan, please." Solas begged now, unable to move, frozen in the position of holding up the foci, the magic holding him there.
She smiled softly at him, and it was worse than watching her rage against him as he walked away or listen to her crying in pain as her arm was ripped from her body. Raising up her remaining arm, she placed her palm against the invisible wall that separated them, the ward rippling at her touch.
The magic was shrieking now, pulsing wildly as the spell reached its zenith and the veil shuddered, rippled, and broke.
The skies ripped open with a thunderous boom, echoing across the continent, bleeding green as an unnamed forced slammed to the ground, knocking every mortal down to the ground. The air became heavier, hard to breathe, magic pouring over the lands like a flood in the desert, wiping away all in its path without regard.
Behind them, the cries on the battlefield rose in pitch, the air thickening as the Fade pushed, pulled, and stretched to fit into place. Spirits screamed in the distance and all throughout the world, curling and twisting into demons as they succumbed to fear and panic, unleashed upon the world and multiplying uncontrollably.
He could see her struggle to remain standing, squeezing her eyes shut as unimaginable pain tore through every fiber of her being, her body withering and unraveling, unprepared for the onslaught of magic that heralded the merging of the Fade with their world. She could feel her insides changing, forcing evolution upon itself as it attempted to awaken the facets of the Elvhen that slept within her, forgotten by time.
But like so many across Thedas, it was a losing battle.
Solas had lived for eons but never had he felt so much pain as he did now, watching as she leaned against the ward, struggling to breathe.
"Vhenan!" He cried, wishing he could go to her, hold her in her last moments or somehow save her with his magic. For a moment, however, he faltered, and made to reach out, to let go of the artifact and release the spell if only to save her. But the foci was latched onto him now, and he was stuck, his feet fastened to the floor, his muscles locked in place.
She whimpered but refused to cry out in pain, biting her lip until it bled. Bracing herself against the barrier, she struggled back to her feet, hunched but standing.
And then, to his horror, she began to dissolve, fingertips and toes blistering and then crumbling away like dust. Holes began to appear in her body, riddling her torso, one in her thigh, another in the opposite calf, their edges blooming outwards like a parasite eating away at her flesh from within.
"You. Will. Watch." She hissed, locking onto his eyes with such intensity that he forgot how to breathe.
More than anything, he wanted to close his eyes and look away. She was right, he was a coward. He couldn't bear to watch her die because of his actions, practically at his own hand. He might as well drive a blade between her ribs, into her heart. His heart as well.
How could he survive eternity after this?
The spell was winding down now, the hurricane of magic that had engulfed the ruin falling still, but it was only the beginning. Outside these crumbling walls the world was being consumed by blood and magic and demons, lost in a chaos that would devour all in its path for centuries to come.
"I hope it was worth this."
Her voice brought him back to the present, and Solas was horrified to see one of her eyes gone, the top left half of her head disappearing into nothingness as the pieces of her fell apart, skin burning at the edges like paper to a flame, flesh turning to ash as the void ate away at her nose.
The ritual was done. The foci fell dark, the magic connecting him to the veil cut off. He was exhausted and drained of all magic. His knees hit the floor as it fell out of his hands and crashed to the floor, breaking to pieces.
Her voice was low and solemn, rather than the anger or bitterness that he had been expecting. His gaze locked onto her last remaining eye, her body more air than flesh at this point. Solas threw himself forward off the dais, heedless of his own weakness, pushing through the pain and forcing trembling limbs to move as he stumbled towards her.
She smiled at him, an expression he had not seen since their last kiss, so full of love and understanding and forgiveness, but it was incomplete with half of her face gone.
"In another world, then?"
Her arm remained outstretched where her hand had been pressed against the barrier, even as the wards came down, and he could almost delude himself that she was reaching out to him. Her eye slipped shut and she exhaled heavily, as if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders.
"Vhenan…" She whispered in relief, her voice lingering a lingering sigh in the air as the pain finally stopped, just as she fell apart.
"NO!" He cried with such desperation, such agony, that his voice scraped at his throat, torn from him like confession in a torture chamber, guttural and rasping and crying out with horror.
Solas lurched forward to grab her hand, but her fingers disintegrated just as his own brushed against them, and what was left of her body crumbled, the smell of soot lingering in the air as her remnants scattered to the wind, the ashes slipping between his fingers.
The wind picked up, and her ashes fluttered like torn butterfly wings in the air. His body shuddered, convulsed, bile rising in his throat.
It was not supposed to be this way.
Not even a body to bury. Even in death, she would be denied to him.
Her voice echoed in his head, soft, sad, her smile haunting, lingering as it flashed before his eyes over and over again.
Acceptance. Forgiveness... Love.
She would never say it out loud. But he had seen it. And she knew he would.
He had destroyed the world once before, and felt guilt at the damage it had caused. It was different this time however. This time he would suffer a personal loss as the veil came down, this time he would feel the ache of death that he had escaped the first time around. This time, he could not escape the pain that followed. He would be forced to watch as he tore out his heart with his own hands, crushing it beyond repair.
She had stopped calling him that after he had removed her vallaslin. It had been years since the endearment had fallen from her lips. The war of attrition that they had played in the shadows had been brutal and ruthless, his spies turning up with their tongues cut out and their fingers cut off, sometimes even their minds broken beyond repair so that he could not glean any information from them. In the years following their fallout, he had convinced himself that she no longer loved him.
He was wrong. She always proved him wrong. It made her unbearable to be around, rubbing her victories in his face, snickering at the dumbfound look on his face whenever she had outmaneuvered him, quirking her lips in that arrogant smirk of hers that made him want to wipe it off her face as he devoured her, made her breathless with his tongue in her mouth, dragging surrender from her lips.
"No…" Solas moaned as he fell to his knees, landing hard on the stone floor as exhaustion and grief came crashing down on him with the force of a sledgehammer, sudden and brutal and all at once. "No, no, no, no, NO!"
He pounded the floor heedless of everything else around him, metal screeching against stone as he smashed his gauntlets on the floor. Pain and sorrow escaped him in deep, animalistic roars, screams ripping into the air like the shriek of a demon rather than the mourning cries of a man. He ignored the pain that traveled up his arms as he continued to punch the floor, or perhaps he reveled in it, knowing that there was no one to blame but himself.
The great Fen'Harel, brought low by a mere woman. A mortal. There would never be another like her.
He could almost hear the teasing lilt in her voice, smug with spiteful victory.
Forcing Solas to watch her die in front of him would be eternal punishment, she knew. A calculated move, even with her death. Cunning woman. She knew it would haunt him for the rest of eternity, vengeance from the grave. Her world was avenged, its killer living in eternal torture as her death played out over and over in his head.
But there would be no one to avenge her. Not when the great villain was himself. Not when anyone else who would have revenge was no doubt dead along with the rest of her world.
"Ma'lath…" Solas sobbed, clutching his chest, fingers curling into the edges of his cuirass, pulling at the metal strapped to his chest, as if he could reach inside and pull out the organ that pounded so loudly in his chest, the pulse echoing in his ears, so loud, too loud, too much, and how was it still beating without her?
How could he live without her? How could he breathe? Eat? Sleep?
Even now her image lingered every time he closed his eyes. His breathes came in short pants, body trembling, face wet with tears, eyes flickering wildly as her ashes continued to dance on the ground around him, swirling with every gust of wind.
Not five minutes and he was losing his mind without her.
I hope it was worth this.
No, no it wasn't. Nothing would be worth it. The thought of her death had shaken him in those years leading up to their confrontation, but the reality of it had stolen the air from his lungs and the sanity from his mind.
"By the stars…" He croaked as he cradled his head, wishing he could cradle her body instead.
The only physical reminder of her was the prosthetic arm that lay abandoned on the ground, the metal worn, scratched, dented. A sick, twisted reminder of every time and every way he had failed her. And he dare not touch it. He refused to. Just looking at it made his stomach churn with the bile that he had been fighting to keep down.
"No, no, no…" He moaned, rocking forward and pressing his forehead into the cold stone, hands still pressing against his chest as if it would somehow ease the pain that burned inside him, like poison spreading through his veins, lighting every inch of his body on fire with grief and guilt, and every fiber of his being screamed at the loss of her.
But this was not a wound that could be stitched together or soothed with magic. This was not a wound that could be healed at all.
He pressed his forehead harder into the ground and screamed until his throat was raw.
The howl of the wolf echoed across the world.
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