Prologue: Sleeping Giants
Pairing: f!Cadash & Solas (gen)
Characters: Female Cadash, Solas
Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Other Tags: Dwarf Lore, Elvhenan Lore, Cadash Thaig, Cad’halash Thaig
Summary: "Cadash" had always been more than a name for Thora: it was her family, it was her history, it was her.
But the Stone tells no tales of exiles. Although she thanked the ancestors with the same lips that sang the Chant, she never felt she knew them, and feared she never would. When the Titan's song lures them into the depths of the Deep Roads, she finds the chance she's been looking for her whole life. Cadash Thaig is within her grasp, she only has to reach for it.
The earth shakes like the sky before a storm. Weeks beneath the surface, and yet Solas feels the tremors under his feet, as though the source still lies miles beneath them.
It speaks again, softer this time, mumbling in the voice of a Titan. Only a few pairs of eyes lift to watch the ceiling quiver, the rest having acclimated days ago. Varric’s attention, as always, turns to their exit to assure himself it’s still there. Their Inquisitor looks, too, but with different eyes. Not nervous, but inquisitive. Listening with intent to a foreign language she strains to understand, and when the shaking ceases her expression falters, tight with shame as her gaze falls back to her book. For Solas it is an old, familiar sound, the echo of an ancient quarry, newly awakened, and does not distract him long. He turns the wooden spoon around the dinner pot, stirring the pieces that had settled at the bottom before they begin to blacken.
“Do you think it knows we’re here?” Varric asks in a low, nervous tone, deliberately spoken so that Valta does not overhear (although Solas doubts she would pay them any mind, either grief or fascination distracts her from their gossip). He looks and finds her now engaged in conversation with the Inquisitor, though her attention seems divided, suspended between the person before her and a force beyond their sight. Satisfied they will not offend the Shaper, he looks back to Varric, whose eyes now glance furtively around the high ceiling.
“It’s difficult to say,” he muses. “We lie so far beneath its notice it may not be truly aware we are here, and yet the Sha-Brytol greet us like a fever come to burn away the disease.”
“Always with the cheerful observations, Chuckles. I suppose a little reassurance is too much to ask for?”
“You misunderstand,” he says. “A soldier who’s weathered a thousand battles may still succumb to plague— an adversary so small it could pass through the eye of a needle.”
“So we’re what in this scenario, a summer cold?”
A smile tugs at his lip. “If you like.”
