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Solas,
I am on my way to Orlais, and the sunrise is clearing the fog from a meadow where I’ve made camp, and I am thinking of you. Thinking of moments like this from years past, where we would rise before the others and walk to the edge of our campsite for a few stolen moments alone at dawn. I cannot help but wonder if you might think of them too, wherever you are now. Is it warm there? Are you in a city? The mountains?
To have known it all, or what felt like it all, for so long, and now to have nothing is a wound I fear will never heal. How am I supposed to look at these places we once walked together the same way? How am I supposed to continue on like this - like everything is just how it was?
You are gone and I am…this. A woman broken by grief and anger and duty. Someone I no longer like or recognize and I’m sure you wouldn’t either.
All anyone sees anymore is The Inquisitor. Even with the inquisition disbanded.
I am no longer a woman or an elf or a person at all. I haven’t been in so long. I have become something other, entirely not my own and yet not belonging to anyone in particular either. I am not a figurehead of the chantry or a single nation, I do not belong to the humans or the elves or anyone else. It feels as though I have given away a small piece of myself to everyone that’s ever asked and now I am hollowed out, staring at a sunrise and wishing I had left it all behind to end the world with you.
I can’t keep myself from writing letters, filling pages and pages with thoughts I wish I were mindlessly sharing with you, knowing I’ll never send them.
I don’t even know if I ought to write vhenan on these letters anymore. To write my love on paper feels foolish, even if you’ll never see it. But then you know - you have to know. I will never love another as I loved you. I will never see another sunrise and think of anything but the mornings where you told me you loved me and always would.
Were you the god of lies even then?
Morinne
—
Vhenan,
Every Dalish elf that passes through our camps that stretch across the mighty expanse of Arlathan forest makes me think of you, of your fiery spirit and devotion. I am haunted by the vallaslin I see each day, so many that match the design you bore. That I stole from you. I hope that perhaps, now that some time has passed, you understand why I lay that truth at your feet.
There are those that speak highly of your work in the south even still - rumors that you are in Orlais, attempting to bend the Empress to your will to secure a permanent home for the elves somewhere in the Dales. What a force you are, ma’lath, stretching that power of yours to do such good. Would that I could see you trample the masked men of Orlais once more. How you shone in the halls of the winter palace, a brilliant emerald amidst an expanse of sea glass.
I have no faith in the empress or the people of Orlais but if anyone may be able to turn the tides in that awful nation, it would be you. Your willingness to fight for the betterment of the world has always inspired me, regardless of how our methods may differ.
I see you in the faces of the people, the green of the trees of this forest, the moon drop flowers that just began to bloom. You are everywhere and yet out of reach. A self-inflicted agony worse than any physical wound I’ve endured.
In another world, vhenan, you never left my arms.
—
Solas,
I have been in Orlais for almost a year and it has felt like an eternity, yet somehow this feels like one of the first times I’ve been free enough to pick up my own pen in months. I have been confused for an elven servant 28 times and been drunkenly proposed to twice - though it was the same man twice in one evening and within a few minutes of each other. But it counts.
I’ve also tipped over eight trays of those frilly cakes you used to like so much at various balls and parties. I don’t actually have much reason why and now that I’ve written it down, I feel like a fool. But then, I so often am. I feel good about it now that I know all this posturing and politicking for a sliver of land has been for naught - Celene played me for a fool. Leliana - Divine Victoria - warned me that it would likely be a fruitless effort, given the empress’ history with the elves. But at least history will look back on me and say I tried.
Or should I say “someone tried without killing the rest of the world in the process?”
Did I mention I had a rather hefty amount of elfroot with Morrigan of all people this evening? Should a woman with as much political power as people insist I do leave that in writing? Hmm.
She is as outwardly cynical and I feel inwardly these days. And after catching up, I was able to reflect with her on our trip with you through the temple of Mythal after all we know now…it was surprisingly comforting. We sat for hours on the balcony of her rooms with the pot of tea enchanted to refill itself again and again. I almost felt normal, I think. And then I remembered how you scowled each time I offered you tea. The way your nose would scrunch in play disgust, to make me laugh on even the worst days back then.
My scouts send word that you are in Arlathan forest, with more and more elves joining your cause each week. They say it’s become difficult to keep an eye on you, that you disappear completely at times and your security is becoming trickier to navigate.
It’s not just so I might hear news of you, I have to remind myself each time I open a missive. I am also working to keep you from ruining the world. I cannot be so shallow as to follow my heart when the whole damn world is at stake.
And yet am I such a foul woman for hoping they’ve seen you? Hoping their missive arrives to tell me you’ve asked for me? You’ve changed your mind?
I’m so restless and bored. I hate this place. You said you enjoyed being at court and I was raised in the forest and look where we are. Stupid.
Not to mention - knowing where you are, and knowing you know where I am. Yet you make no moves for me and will not let me come for you. There are days that if I loved you any less, I would loathe you with more ferocity than I have words for.
Morinne
—
Vhenan,
I have returned to a home in the fade I built millenia ago and found it crumbling, gray, and lifeless. I’m not sure if you have spread word of me or others have, but it seems the hunts have begun in earnest and I will not risk failure to sleep under the stars and have my throat cut in the night.
I don’t find that this paranoia suits me but this place, once alive and a true home to me, feels like little more than a constant reminder of how great my failures have been.
I wonder what you would make of it. Would you look upon these crumbling walls and see the same potential you did in Skyhold? Or would you see the shattered glass and single table setting and see the same broken man I do?
You had not kissed me yet. I did not know what you would come to mean to me, though perhaps if I am to be honest with myself, I had begun to. To bring you to the place that had once been my stronghold, the seat of my rebellion and where I had formed the ruination of our world, as a last bastion and see the hope it brought you in a single glance - the relieved tears it brought to your eyes and the gratitude in your smile…
I am a fool, vhenan, to think I would find a home again anywhere but by your side.
My agents move to gather artifacts that will aid in my final ritual and my scouts are spread thin, but I find myself unable to spare at least a couple from keeping an eye on you. I hope you’ll forgive me the caution, but I cannot follow you each night in the fade without alarming you and I need to know you are alive. I need to know you are safe. Even if you are still in Orlais, which last I heard, you should be…
I have told them to stay out of sight, to remain unnoticed to you. It’s only for my sanity.
Ir abelas vhenan.
—
Solas,
Care to explain why a regret demon that takes the form of an enormous wolf is stalking the halls of Skyhold? It called itself the regret of a god and climbed from the plaster paintings in the rotunda, attacking several groups of caretakers we’d sent to keep an eye on the grounds after the last couple of years.
How does it feel, I wonder, to have that regret of yours sent back to the fade? Did you sense it somehow? Did that regret return to your heart - filling a space within you once more?
You confound me at every turn. If your regrets are so visceral that they take shape from the very plaster, why won’t you come home to me? Call me to your side and I will be there in a heartbeat, you fool. I would forgive it all and let this foul world burn if you would just let me look into your eyes again.
Why is that so much to ask?
We have placed wards around the fortress and notices to deter visitors. Only Morrigan and I will be able to enter Skyhold from now on, though I’d be willing to guess you’d find your way in too if you ever chose to. This place was a sanctuary once, a refuge for so many, and now we must seal it away. My heart aches for the days when it was filled with life and the smell of baking bread and loud laughter, clattering swords during training, your whispered words of wisdom.
I make for Orzammar now, to see Varric for the first time in years. He has been working with Bianca to make the “prosthetic to end all prosthetics” as he says and I worry I’ll be lugging around something as bulky as his crossbow at the end of my arm. But for Varric, I will become part crossbow-extraordinaire.
I’ve grown so used to having something simple or nothing at all, though traces of lingering magic still remain even all this time later. Nerves that pinch and tingle when the fade is thin. Traces of you burned into my flesh even all this time later.
A reminder that you were real and that regardless of all it cost me, I would do it again. All for another chance at those few months by your side.
Morinne
—
Vhenan,
I cannot keep myself from your dreams, from finding you in the fade. My scouts send word but it is not enough to know you live. It is cruel of me and impossibly selfish, to seek you out each evening and run the moment your eyes find me, but if you were to reach out…I am not sure I would have the strength to face you and turn away. I would be lost in your eyes, the color of evening rain clouds, and I would be grateful for it.
There are those who might wax poetic about forgetting the depths of their lovers eyes or the exact intonation of their laughter after time apart, but it’s been nearly three years since the Exalted Council and five since our time in the Inquisition and you are as vivid in my mind as if I never left your side. I cannot imagine you fading from my memory. Should that day ever arrive, I cannot fathom how I would go on.
For now, I must remain content to watch you from a distance as you walk the wild memories of the fade. Following in my wolf form as you gather herbs around Skyhold. Smiling from out of sight as you relive memories of your childhood, dancing with your mother in front of your clan's campfire and bouncing on your toes to reach the halla. Longing to lay by your side once more as you relive the times we lay together under the stars and you pointed to all the constellations you knew, voice thick from the elfroot we’d indulged in. Watching from above as you pace that cursed place in Crestwood, again and again, as if retracing your steps will undo what I did to you.
I cannot undo it, dear heart, but I can keep the despair demons from your dreams. I hope that provides some small relief to you.
I have located the blade that will be critical to my ritual and have plans to retrieve it soon. With any luck, things will be in motion before too much longer. If you find it in your heart to forgive me for this, one day, it will be my honor to guide you through the new world. To tell you everything, truly everything.
There are so many reasons I must do this, vhenan, and one day I will explain them all to you. I swear it.
—
Sa’lath,
I have been taking a break, allowing myself to rest for the first time in literal years, and simply let news come to me. It is strange to sit back and let myself read or sleep past sunrise, indulgences I have scarcely enjoyed in the last few years.
I don’t know if even your scouts would be able to find me here, deep in a forgotten corner of Thedas, hidden and protected by ancient magics and complicated wards only Morrigan understands fully. Well I suppose you would as well, but you won’t come looking for me yourself as we both know.
I have had time to bury myself in the study of elvhen, something I’ve desired the time to do since long before I met you. If we ever meet again, I hope to impress you with how the old language feels more natural to me now. The voices of Mythal’s well are quieter than they used to be, but they whisper corrections now and then, guiding my intonation or ensuring I don’t get stuck on a particularly difficult word in the texts I work from.
And then there is Morrigan. Where to begin… How can I possibly begin to put in words what she’s explained to me? The knowledge she’s acquired since Mythal came to her, yet again reduced to a wisp of spirit after you killed Flemeth. What she’s now shared with me and…fenehdis Solas. She won’t tell me everything - she insists that although she trusts me, there is much that must come from you, not from her or from Mythal.
But what she has said…I cannot fathom the grief and pain that sat with you through your uthenera, that stewed in your bones for millennia before you awoke. To be torn from your purpose, twisted to become her weapon…
She explained what she could and… vhenan, I sat with her and wept for you for hours. It is a relief to have a friend in her and to understand you that much better but my heart aches to know what horrors you have endured in the name of duty.
I cannot believe I stood before you, pulled you to me and kissed you, while wearing her vallaslin. I cannot believe you fell for me even so.
I am just… without words for it.
Ir abelas, vhenan
Morinne
—
Vhenan,
You have disappeared from my sight - my dreams are quiet and my scouts send no word. I imagine if something had happened to you, I would feel the reverberations through time, that the fade would feel forever changed to me. And yet it is like you have simply vanished and my mind runs rampant with ideas of what could have befallen you.
Where are you hiding, ma lath? I have no right to know, no right to feel this need to know, but you have made a selfish man of me. I want no one else to know your touch, no one else to know the way you frown in your sleep or exactly how much butter you insist is right on your morning toast.
Did I overstep my bounds by visiting your dreams? You stopped chasing after me and had finally begun to allow me to sit beside you in silence. I thought we might have reached some sort of accord. It brought me such peace, to sit there by your side in the fade, wherever your dreams led us each evening.
It became easier to plan, to see straight lines through the mess of options that lay before me, when sitting quietly with you each night.
I have found the dagger I will use for my ritual and know I will see it through to the end. Only a handful of final preparations remain, though I assume delays will abound as they have the last few years. There is always something. How has it been so long without you? How has it been so long without relief from this duty, this demand?
I want to sit at your side once more, not in the fade or as a beast or a god, but as your man. I want you to see the wonder of a world born anew and to relish immortality by your side. Even if that immortality is spent begging for your forgiveness.
Please be alright. I have no gods to pray to but if I did, I would beg that you are alive and unharmed and some magic hides you from me. Let that be all this is.
—
Solas,
You are such a slippery little shit. I have come so close and you know it. YOU KNOW IT. I feel like I can smell the oils you use on the leather of your staff. I am so close. And yet you slip away, again and again. Am I losing my mind? I can’t tell anymore. Maybe.
I am exhausted and worn thin again. I feel like the bunny Varric used to always call me, hiding in bushes and bouncing around the forest, eternally hoping to stay out of sight. But I am not as young as I was back then, and spending each day hiking from sunrise to sunset is so much more exhausting than it was back then.
Have you noticed my gifts though? Everytime I have the chance, I leave your scouts on your altars if they get too close to catching me. Can you blame me? They’d kill me if they could, I think. And they’re trying to end the world. I don’t love killing my fellow elves but then again, they’ve shunned me for nearly a decade now. And I was always taught to leave offerings to the dread wolf when passing by his altars. I wouldn’t want to catch his eye after all.
Varric is following a lead somewhere outside Kirkwall, with Harding and a new colleague he’s nicknamed Rook - a mage he says reminds him of Hawke. He insists he wants to help, wants to find you and save the world yet again. “You can’t cut me out of things like this, bunny, where else will I get all the best stories?” I wanted to keep him out of it but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, insisting that if I didn’t give him a lead, he’d find his own. And I’m at the point where more eyes are better than my tired ones alone.
I’ll be in Minrathous for a few days, to see Dorian and Mae, before heading back south for a while. Divine Leliana has asked that I come and settle some political disputes by way of organizing what Inquisition scouts remain, but she didn’t confirm much more than that.
I feel like I’ve seen the whole world over the last seven years. The whole world and yet not you.
Morinne
—
Vhenan,
You came north and were on me faster than I could prepare for, my cunning girl. I enjoyed playing chase with you, dancing between the trees and watching you grow frustrated as your quarry evaded you again and again. That is, until you began stringing up my scouts and leaving them for me. I suppose I cannot fault you for that, but it did surprise me. I’d almost forgotten how deadly you can be.
It is almost time to act. The final pieces fall into place around me finally.
I write to you from Skyhold. Undoing your wards was surprisingly tricky - who aided you with them, I wonder. I managed, as I’m sure you guessed I might.
If something should go wrong, I will leave this fragment here, this memory - in case you ever need it.
Perhaps it will allow you to forgive me if I fail this world once more.
I don’t know why I maintained all these letters and never sent them. Yet another self-prescribed punishment for my betrayal of you - to put the feelings down on paper and seal them away, knowing you may never see just how much the lies and pain I caused you haunted me. I will leave only the one. A failsafe, if you will. So you know, if it all goes wrong, that you were with me all the way.
There was never another, Morinne. There never could be.
On the days I could no longer find a way forward or a reason why I continued down this path, why I forced myself to continue this dinan’shiral, I thought of a future where you might know the full glory of the world without the veil. I thought of you, vhenan.
Ar lath ma bellanaris vhenan. Ar salin banal nadas ar lath ma.
—
Solas,
How many letters have I written and left unsent? How many books lay littered around homes I’ve come and gone from since Skyhold, all full of things I longed to tell you? I lost count years ago. I imagine a bookshelf dedicated to them in the Vir Dithara and that someday, wandering the Crossroads, you will stumble upon the musings of a woman who loved you to the point of madness.
Varric says you are somewhere near Tevinter. He says you are close to beginning the end of all things, that the signs are all there - that you’re ready. Morrigan is opening our eluvian for me in three days and I am to join them, hopefully we will be able to finally find you and set things right.
This will be the first letter of all those I actually send. Where it will end up I can’t say, but Leliana’s ravens are still cunning, so I trust it’ll at least get close. All this to say - I have not given up on you. I cannot imagine you would think me capable of doing so, given the last eight years, but now it is in writing and will hopefully be in your hands and then hopefully your hands will be in mine. Hopefully I can tell you myself.
Wait for me, vhenan. Speak with me before you burn the world down. If there is any love in your heart left for me, please. Wait. I will be there soon.
Morinne
—
Vhenan,
I do not know if you will read these words. My ritual is ready and will soon be set in motion. Perhaps if you do read this the world will be as it once was, and you will see why all I did was necessary. I cannot ask for your forgiveness. I know I will never be worthy of it. All I ask is that one day, if I am so lucky, you might come to understand.
That night in Crestwood, when I shared the truth about your vallaslin…you have no idea how close I came to breaking. I was at war with myself - to tell you everything or to abandon it all and remain with you as Solas, which was all I wanted from the moment I met you. How could I lay such burdens at your feet? How could I ask you to endure what the last ten years have required of me and what is still yet to come?
I regret the pain I caused you. It lives within me every day and is an ache I will carry for eternity. My feelings - my love for you - will never change. You are my heart now, as you always have been.
—
They both set down stacks of letters with shaking hands, letters never meant to be seen but somehow sent. Letters of grief and love and fear. Mirrored moments across time, across dreams, across the world.
Morinne sits at the desk in the rotunda, hands shaking before a glowing statuette in the shape of a howling wolf. The sky tore open and she came home, to Skyhold, to Tarasyl'an Te'las. He was not here but this was. This wolf, and this stack, and a single note atop the letters.
“He only meant to leave you the last, but you need them all. Your love could fix this, fix it all - him, the sky, the world - and he might finally let you. He’s trapped now, but won’t always be. Save him, like you said you would before, and the wolf and rabbit can both heal what’s broken.”
The writing is scratchy and imperfect, but familiar. It is signed with a single letter, which shouldn’t be enough, but she knows who has gifted her these words. The only soul who would ever see her save him, extending one last lifeline for her - showing her it was worth the wait, if she can brave one more fight for him.
He’d written “vhenan”. Every time. Like he’d never had a doubt in his mind.
“Morrigan,” she shouts, as she dashes from the seat at the desk she knows too well, even all these years later. She clutches the wolf and his writing to her chest, like if she let it go, she might disappear along with it. The halls of Skyhold are as familiar as her palms or as his, her home once and perhaps in some way, her salvation yet again. She tears through them, looking for her dear friend. “Morrigan, we have to go! We have to get to Minrathous! I can still fix this!”
Solas falls to his knees in the fade, the world around him reduced to black and white as he finds a lifeline in the prison of his own making.
The papers are ripped from journals, some tear stained and others with corners dipped in wine or tea, but all unmistakably her and it should not be possible. In this place, this prison, he should not have anything, let alone something written by her hand that still smells faintly of her skin. Tears wrack his frame and he prays to whatever divinity left in this tainted world that Rook will not reach for him now, that he might have this one moment for himself.
It is still regret, it is still agony, but it is also relief. She never gave up, never let him go. She dreamt and wished and somehow learned of all he’d done and still chased after him.
A whisper on the fade winds echos around him, somehow breaching the walls of this place and he holds the letters from his beloved to his chest like a they are more than just papers but are his salvation. He cannot risk that they could be blown away or all be a dream. A trick of the fade.
“You saved me once,” a familiar voice says, hurried to ensure his message gets through before whatever opening he’s found closes shut once more, “and she always wanted to save you. She never gave up. You were scared of letting a rabbit so close to the wolf’s jaws, but she always knew the danger and loved you anyway. We all did.”
And before anything else can be said, the message is cut off and Cole is gone again. One last gift of compassion, one last act of mercy from a dear friend. It makes his head spin, his palms sweat and his hands shake. But he swallows his guilt and turns to face the endless gray of the fade around him, and then begins to read again.