solas. fen'harel. the dread wolf. he who hunts alone.
he likes frilly cakes.
he loves and is loved by mythal.
he snorts sometimes when he laughs.
he has murdered his closest friends.
he shoves his leg between lavellan's in the fade.
he asks, afterward, to talk.
he has done beautiful, brave, glorious things.
he has done unspeakably cruel things.
he is wisdom and he is pride.
he was corrupted by war.
he destroyed himself by trying to save the elvhen.
he won the war against the evanuris but there was nothing left.
he woke into a surreal nightmare, stripped of his power and terrifyingly helpless.
he went immediately to planning a restoration, an attempt to fix what he had broken.
we are made to feel the pressure he was under by playing through in hushed whispers, where we sacrifice a year and all that occurred within it based on a limited perspective of what the current world was like.
while his efforts will address his guilt, alleviating his guilt is not the core reason for them.
the evanuris will escape. with them, directly or indirectly, the blight will pour across thedas.
the worst he can do to the world, the damage from tearing down the veil, will be as nothing compared to the absolute destruction wrought by the evanuris and the blight.
his greatest, truest mistake is in trusting none, but he has been shown time and again that his deepest trusts are not reciprocated (nor does he reciprocate that trust in turn).
bitter experience has taught him to bear his duty alone. and it is a just duty, even terrible as it is.
but when all is over, when ghilan'nain's dragon lay dead; when ghilan'nain herself lay dead; when elgar'nan's dragon lay dead; and, finally, when elgar'nan himself, all-father, first-born of the evanuris, king and lord and god and tyrant to the ancient elvhen, when he, too, lay dead...
the world changed. solas' world changed. the possibilities changed. and he could step free of his dread path.
he goes to heal the titans, his first and greatest victims.
beyond that, we do not know.
what will become of the veil, held in place not by unwilling tyrants constantly pushing at their cage, but by a willing soul who holds regard for both spirits and mortals?
in time, can a way be discovered to ease it down?
neither mortal nor spirit are wounded by the mere existence of the veil. they are limited by its existence, and crossing it is a risk, even a great one. but it is a division between worlds, not a weapon dripping poison into each.
it can remain, and ways can be developed in time to ease the passages, to ease the burden.
or it can be removed, carefully and thoughtfully, no longer rushed by the impending doom on the horizon.
but the titans are aching, have been aching, have been hurting and raging all this time. they are the ones who deserve attention. the spirits are not damaged by existence in the fade, just as the mortals are not damaged by existence in the waking realm. time will ease the travel between, in some way or other
but the titans are more important.
and he goes to them. of his own volition. a direction chosen as soon as he steps free of his path of death.
and that is why i love him so. he is not a foolish man; not a selfish one; not an ignorant one; not a conceited one. he is wounded, certainly, and cautious, and determined to the point of obsession. but with cause!
not a hypothetical, grasping-at-straws cause, but a genuine, immediate, explicit one.
in trespasser, we are shown, in a microcosm, what he is doing on a grand scale. without his intercession, the inquisitor will die, and the origin of their death is his fault.
so he takes their arm to preserve their body. it serves his purposes to do so, yes, but it is also a symbol of what he is doing for the world. for the worlds. he will wound that they might be alive to be wounded. he will take something from them that something might left to be wanting what was taken.
without his intercession, the worlds will die. with, they will be wounded.
a wise surgeon chooses the wounding.