It was not for nothing, my friend. The distraction the spirits gave us allowed our agents to retrieve the relic. [...] No force could have breached their citadel, but it was necessary for the enemy to believe we were committed.
Okay, maybe I'm going to be a bit critical here but—
I think I'm going to ignore everything they said in AMA –especially JE– and add from my own understanding and knowledge about Solas and other characters lol
The game is simple enough to make this easy 🤷🏻♀️
I mean, it's perfectly fine if someone doesn't like Solas, but to take choices or to try and alienate players to feel like they do it's a bit... Well. A bit too much. I can understand from where those comments about Solas' regrets came from tho
I won't say anything about what he said about Davrin because that was blatant racism and yeah, I'm not happy about it at all when Davrin turned out to be one of my favourite companions in DATV.
Solas? It seems like he doesn't care, but you have to fight Regret of Felassan; he doesn't care, but he helps you rescue Dalish people and call them his people; he doesn't care, but he says explicitly he can't think any way to help the elves as the world is now – when the world wants them submitted. And more, but he doesn't care.
He fights a rebellion. He turns against Mythal and all the Evanuris. He worries so much about spirits. He approves of you helping people in Inquisition – it's so easy to make him like you if you help people in the Hinterlands. So easy.
Yeah, guilt, pride, and regret. But he is so much more than that. He is driven by more than that.
So yes, I'll think I may do my own cooking with what they gave me: fast food and the scrumptious cheesecake with berries on top 😔
Disclaimer: *Angry elves are the cutest thing to write*
Another disclaimer: tumblr is such a joy today. my original post with the prompt by @thevikingwoman has been lost in the Void somewhere. So fyi: The prompt was: in the face of his/her fury.
Under the cut, because kinda long.
Hell hath no fury
“Freed will be all slaves!”
His ancient parole thunders across the hall as he raises his voice; this is the spark that finally and irrevocably spurs them into action. His last words are swallowed by the answering cries of the elves drawing their weapons and rushing towards their would-be masters, swords raised high, the pain of years and even generations of abuse and cruelty etched into their contorted faces. Their former owners clearly weren’t prepared for battle when they came here. They walked blindly into his trap, confident in their misguided assumption of inherent superiority over his race. They trusted that their vicious words of intimidation and the threat of magic would frighten the elves they consider their property back into place, as it has been for hundreds of years.
But the instant the elves surge forward, bloodlust in their hearts and on their faces, a deafening blast shatters the high wooden gates behind them, the force of it such that Solas has difficulty keeping on his feet. A throng of armed men that don’t belong to the army he has been building pour through the doorway, swarming into the room with a swell of noise, battle cries, and stomping, trampling feet, their glinting blades held high. Solas unconsciously tightens the grip on his staff as he struggles for a moment to grasp who these sudden intruders fight for or who could have sent them here. But then he looks more closely, pacing up and down on the dais raised in the middle of the room, his mind grinding into action, and he recognizes the symbol emblazoned on the chest pieces of their armor; an eye wreathed in holy flame. He has seen it on banners swaying in the wind, carried into many battles when he was still fighting on the same side as them. The Inquisition. Confusion makes his brows knit together. She disbanded the Inquisition years ago. How could they be here? It takes him a moment to catch on, to realize that, no matter how this has happened, it might mean –
The thought hasn’t fully formed in his head yet, but his eyes are already raking across the room, trying to discern a single face amidst the horde. He hears her before his eyes have found her, however. Lokil. She is shouting commands at someone, but he still has not found her from where he is observing the fray ensuing below. He turns to join them, protect his men, find her, but-
He hasn’t taken two steps towards the stairs that lead down into the room when he stops dead in his tracks.
She is there.
“Hello, Solas.” She is slowly ascending the steps, the staff that he helped craft for her held at her side by a glinting prosthetic hand.
He tried to cling to every detail of her face in the vast space of the years since he saw her last. He imprinted every small line, and every freckle in his memory, willingly scratching out parts of himself to make room for her and then had to chastise himself for doing so. Even years spent apart and spent deliberately evading her efforts at tracking him down are not enough to dull the sharp feeling she pushed into him. It is bubbling up painfully, wrenching and broiling into a tight knot in his gut at the unexpected sight of her. Seeing her now without warning that she would be here is like seeing her for the first time all over again.
She has changed so much, and yet, not at all. She has become thin and there are shadows under her eyes. But her gaze is still so inescapable, so compelling, as if she knew every one of his thoughts chasing each other around his head. The gleam in her eyes is triumphant at having finally tracked him down, but Solas still notices that they are tinged with a trace of bitterness; she is trying to press it to the corners, make it unseen. She knew that he would be here and she has had a chance to prepare for this encounter, unwilling to offer her pain to him freely.
He would not deserve it under any circumstance.
So he will not push his pain onto her either; and he straightens himself and hardens his expression, clasps his hands behind his back, adopting a proud, characteristic stance. “Vhenan.” He has to overcome, for both their sakes. One glimpse cannot be enough to weaken his resolve again. She comes to a slow stop a few feet from him, the smallest flicker on her face betraying her heart. Vhenan. The endearment stings. He knows her too well. He does not wish to hurt her. “So. You have found me at last. How did you do it?”
A small half-smile pulls at one corner of her lips. Her lips.“It took me some time, but-”, she admits, “I figured out my mistake.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Oh? And what was that?” For one fleeting moment, he can feel himself wanting to slip into his old ways, guiding her, encouraging her.
“I spent three years trying to track you down. To no avail.” Sting. Three years she considers wasted. To her, it is a lot. “For too long I let myself wallow in my pain. The way you left-” Sting. “They way you left, it left me feeling… weak.” She hates admitting it, he knows. “Weaker than I was. I believed it would be almost impossible to calculate your next moves and guess at your intentions. I thought we simply had too little information; you didn’t leave me with much to go on, after all.” Sting. The memory of the shattered remains of their bond he left her with makes her eyebrows knit together softly for a moment. “Especially after disbanding; we lacked the resources of the old Inquisition. But I was wrong to let my grief cloud my judgment. I let go of the idea of -” She falters. “The idea that I could… persuade you into coming back. I figured out… erm… a different way forward. It was enough to track you to this place.”
Solas cannot stop his expression from softening into a small, indulgent smile. “I applaud your determination.” He bows his head in a gesture of respect for her. “I always have. I have ever admired your ability to question your own outlook whenever you felt yourself getting stuck; to question your decisions.” Sting. “An ability all too rare in those who hold positions of immense power, like you do.”
Something defiant and cocky lights up her features. She seems to be chewing on her tongue, clearly holding back a playfully indignant remark at his patronizing tone and at the challenge. This was nothing he ever had to teach her, and he knows it. But Solas delights in the fact that he is still able to gaud her this way, to spark her defiance and her resolution. Talking to her still seems so familiar. He pauses and looks at her more seriously then. “The worst decision you ever made, however-” His hands twitch behind his back. “- I could not talk you out of.”
The corners of her mouth turn down as if there was a bitter taste on her tongue. “How can you say that.”, she demands quietly, the short-lived spark from a moment before fading somewhat. It is no real question; merely an expression of the hurt the thought causes her that he might not put the same unyielding faith in their love anymore. He still does. There is simply no point in indulging that thought. This can never be.
She speaks again, putting deliberate pressure on every slow, measured word. “It was worth it.”, she says earnestly, her conviction unbroken. He can tell that she is struggling to keep her voice from wavering. “All of it. I don’t regret a single day spent by your side.” She takes a steadying breath and raises her chin proudly. “And there is nothing you can do that could ever make me.”
She has him there. Solas hates himself for allowing it to show - for what good will it do her? - but he is unable to keep his face from contorting a little in the shared pain over the impossibility of this love. He will never understand what he can possibly have done to earn this remarkable woman’s trust. How he would wish to lavish his love on her, bury her in warm words and soothe the tender aches he has inflicted on her - on them both - with still more tender kisses.
He falters.
“My love, I-”
Whoosh. There is a sharp hissing sound and a bolt of heat is rushing straight for his face. Solas gets the barrier up just in time. When the burst of flame hits the shield and bounces off to the sides, he can see her again, her stance no longer still and upright, but getting ready to hit him again, her feet planted firmly on the ground, ready to attack. Before Solas has fully realized what is happening, she has cast two more spells, and suddenly the air around him is crackling with her magic, as she releases blast after blast, turning the elements loose on him. But he does not fight back. Some part of him is still so deeply in the habit of trusting her, though that may be a mistake by now, he begins to realize. With every blast she releases, she steps closer, forcing him to retreat from her onslaught. She whirls her staff above her head and then smashes its blade on the stone floor with a keening sound that makes his teeth hurt, making the ground rumble beneath his feet, a snarl on her face. The force of the spell makes him bend over to balance himself out and prevent his feet from giving in. The barrier flickers, as he can feel the stone balustrade that lines the dais at his back. He cannot help but marvel at the strength of her magic; she has become powerful.
She got him. Clever girl.
He realizes that she lured him into thinking that she was about to give in to her grief once more. She knows him well enough, too, it seems. He never was able to resist whenever she released the full, incomprehensible power of her conviction and her utter trust in him on his nervous heart. A honey trap. She knew that he could not bear to contemplate in earnest what his betrayal must have done to her. And she used it to lower his guard.
“Fight back!”, she yells, her voice ripping through the singed air, just a hint of a laugh in it. Taunting him. “Fight back!”
But all he can do is look at her and gravely shake his head. He puts the barrier up before she releases a new string of attacks, even fiercer than the last one.
Enraged, she seems to understand perfectly why he doesn’t defend himself as she redoubles her efforts and hits him again and again, a barrage of fire and ice assaulting his barrier in an earnest attempt to break it. But she never gets that far.
Out of nowhere, she interrupts her advance and turns her head abruptly to look around the room. The afterglow of her spells still has his ears ringing. But then he hears the roaring, cheering cries of the soldiers and he realizes that the battle in the room down below is over.
He lingers a moment too long. He means to turn his head and look at her again, but before she has fully come into focus, Solas can feel something cold and flat hitting the side of his head hard, sending him reeling sideways. He stumbles and falls backward, his back against the banister behind him. He fights the urge to vomit. When the pain and nausea recede and the vision before his eyes has cleared once more, she is standing over him, a broad, wicked grin on her face.
“You didn’t think that I’d be gotten rid of that easily, did you? You taught me, after all.”, she says jubilantly, her tone giddy. She bends down to where he is sitting slumped on the floor and grabs his chin none too gently, jerking his face up to force him to look directly into her eyes.
Inescapable.
Solas cannot help but chuckle weakly. “Well done. I have to admit, seeing you here, like this-” He smiles sheepishly, more at his own weakness than at her. He knows his eyes are smoldering with admiration for her, but he cannot help himself. “You played to my one weakness.”
She grins, despite herself. “Just like you always did with me. I learned from the best.”
“That was my mistake then.” There it is again. Sting. Her grip on his chin tightens harshly. But he feels a surge of pride in her at her words.
She lifts one eyebrow and speaks, a worthy imitation of his most condescending expression and his most patronizing tone, mockery dripping like honey from her words. “Tsk, tsk, Solas. Letting mere sentiment get in the way of your oh-so-rational, ever-so-cautious assessments. A foolish beginner’s mistake.” She is delighting in every word. And she deserves to.
“I will never lie down and accept the fate you have in store for me.” Sting. ”But until we settle that argument once and for all, there are goals we share.” She nods in the direction of the doors, and he assumes that she means his plans to abolish slavery. “I think I see now that you had to leave. Well-”, she interrupts herself, “No. I don’t understand it, exactly. But I have come to terms with it.” Then she grins, her voice dangerously sweet as she continues, only for him to hear, for him alone to understand her precise meaning. “Still. This is for the way you did it.”
And her backhand smacks the side of his face, hard, not like he has done to her so many times when she was still his, not meaning to hurt but always to heighten her pleasure. This stings. They are even. The smile on her face softens, then. Glee at her victory has rekindled that bright, fiery spark in her eyes again that he has not seen there for a long time. He believed he had managed to snuff out the dim glimmer that was left of it when he turned his back on her the last time they saw each other and stepped through the Eluvian. “Whenever you’re ready, Solas.”, she whispers. “Whenever you’re ready for this to be over, you know where to find me.” She wipes a trickle of blood from his lips with her thumb, still grabbing his chin. “Come home.” And she crosses the small distance between them, as she has done so many times before, and in many different ways, and places the softest kiss on his lips, still smiling. She lingers just a second too long. “And, Solas.”, she whispers, “I did mean what I said. I don’t regret any of it. And I never will.”
One last stroke across the line of his jaw with just the tips of her fingers, and she turns and walks away. Though reluctant to admit it even to himself, Solas cannot help but feel his love for her grow. He tried to tear her apart with his love and his lies. And not only does she still hold on to this love, but she also used it to figure out a way to overcome. What a vicious half-truth she used to slink her way into his head. Just like she said: She learned from the best.
Solas scrambles to his feet, still dazed. He turns to see her leaving the hall through the shattered wooden gates, surrounded by cheering soldiers, but not before throwing one last glowing look over her shoulder back at him.
For this months Patreon reward I asked @destinyapostasy to surprise me, and I am NOT disappointed, she game me sad Solas and I love everything about this.
He looks so terrible regretful, his bowed head. The jawbone is so heavy, I can’t. Perfect profile. The gauntlet from his god armor, aahhhhh!!!
