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There’s rage in her eyes, glowing golden against the backdrop of the final bow of the world. Her hand quivers on the hilt of her sword. The blade buzzes, crackles with magic, just waiting to strike true.
She’s panting, pushing breath from broken, ash-filled lungs, and he kneels before her, his gaze locked on the setting of a dying world.
(she could do it,
she could kill him now and be done with it,)
The scarred sky – cracked and broken – bleeds dying magic into the world below, but it is nothing he can reach. Nothing he reaches for.
“You won,” she says, wheezes past cracked teeth and choked throat. The embers dance about his head, tracking a vallaslin that doesn’t exist. Paints a more broken picture than the one kneeling in front of her.
He looks at her.
Coward, she wants to call him. She has learnt the cruellest of words for what he is in Elvhen. She knows what he is. The Dread Wolf of every youngling’s nightmare. The Dread Wolf that stalks the world, searching mischief.
Trickery.
(trickery of the gods themselves,)
He doesn’t say anything to contradict her. Doesn’t sway his eyes from her blade. She could kill him now, for all he has done.
He has loved her, even still. He still whispers in her head. Dying Elvhen words, ebbing away into the void.
(he has loved her, and still, he has killed all that she’s loved,)
She remembers the Keeper’s words, long ago before she left for the Conclave; “steel your heart to the words of the shemlen.”
And, yet, here she stands – hunched, broken, heaving, grieving – with her steeled heart torn apart by one of the People. By one who was all, they strived to be like, even a little.
The dragons of dreams have razed the world. The People have salted the earth. Nothing remains. Not here.
Just them.
She wishes he would speak.
“Did I?” He whispers, fingers black from soot and blood. His fine furs burned away to reveal the scalded armour beneath. He looks young, yet millennia old.
She raises the sword.
(Varric died, holding her hand,
Cole burned, as every spirit and spirit-made-human did,)
(Lavellan holds a vigil, gazing down upon her destroyer,)
He got what he wanted, in the end.
The People. The Evanuris.
He got everything that they were not. He asked for far too much. It wasn’t enough.
“No,” she says with a blood-filled mouth. She is dying. Has been for a very long time. There’s nothing in his eyes. No hope. No despair.
(Cullen commanded a dead army,)
He is far too ready to die for his mistake. His betrayal.
She doesn’t quite know what hurts the most; his betrayal of her and her people, or the destruction that came from it.
(Divine Victoria lead her armies to war,)
The dragon dances across a burning field. The playground of death.
She readies her sword.
(Cassandra fells the bigger of the dragons, its sharp scales ripping ground and tree and person as it goes,
Lavellan doesn’t see Cassandra after that,)
With a shout, she plunges the blade into the earth by his knees, his hands outstretched toward her in silent forgiveness. She heaves, spits blood, and stares at him.
‘Do it yourself,’ dances at the back of her tongue. Wants its presence known.
She loves him too much for that.
She knows she’s crying when his eyes turn mournful. The fire and the cold of the Frostbacks have numbed her cheeks to it. She blames the burning of her eyes on the smoke.
“Ir abelas, ma vhenan.”
He says it quietly, more prayer than a whisper, and she takes a strangled breath.
She wants to speak. To tell him never to call her that again, because the words already dance about her mind; multitudes of voices whispering, Mythal screaming.
She wants to speak. She screams.
Her grief. Her anger. She kneels before him, her sword between them, and she heaves her rage through anguished screams.
(Mythal is louder than all the rest,)
He says nothing. She wants to tell him what all he’s done has done to her. The indescribable feeling within her that only has one outlet.
The final dragon pays them no mind. He is dying too.
They are the last three living things in this world, right there, at that moment. Thedas burns and his failure has nothing on her grief.
The ground cracks. She wants to leave him here; let him wallow in his loss and misery until the end has reached them both, but even now – even in her indescribable hate – she can’t quite let him die alone.
His eyes on hers are echoes of dying stars.
Kneeling before him, she presses their foreheads together as the world burns. His eyes betray his pain. Her eyes are empty (longing for a past).
Embers trail empty nothings. The night is loud. The dawn is burning.
The dragon swallows the sun.
Her mouth is full of ashes.