Chapter Text
Skyhold crests through the peaks on the third morning.
They dismount near the edge of a ridge, leaving the horses to graze as they climb higher to survey the path ahead. Before them, Skyhold unfurls like a forgotten monument — its grandeur worn thin but persistent all the same, its history layered beneath neglect and snow.
A beautiful ruin, a shelter to be restored.
A wound carved into the mountains, still bleeding memories both ancient and not yet made.
Rook is the sole figure with her eyes turned away from the fortress in the cliffs.
Hovering in the Dread Wolf’s shadow, she looks upon him alone.
The sun edges through the clouds, the brilliant light brushing over his profile. It catches the slope of his cheekbone, the angle of his jaw, the contemplative set of his mouth. His expression is unreadable — too composed, too still.
In some ways, she may as well be staring into the sun directly. Solas is something that leaves afterimages and burns she doesn’t want to contend with.
And here, now… he stands before the place where he once unmade the world. Where he shattered the heavens and pulled the Veil across Thedas like a funeral shroud.
Skyhold is his, whether he acknowledges it or not.
She wonders if it feels like — standing before it again, after all this time. Is it merely a tool for him to discard the Inquisition’s hands now that he has no use of it? Or is it an echo of a place he called home — bringing back memories of elves in their prime, proud and unyielding? Or simply a monument to his failures, another reminder of how he failed this world and should wipe it clean to start anew?
Rook can’t tell.
When Solas gazes upon it now, it is with the crafted eyes of a stranger.
But she knows what it is she finds in that crumbling, eternal stone.
Clarity.
Clarity that comes with the same startling quality of gold highlighted on Solas’s long lashes.
The same kind of clarity that pushed her to protect Haven — that she can’t keep wandering through the wreckage of survival, stumbling under the weight of what is lost. Life would be so, so much easier if that’s the kind of person she could be. But here, beneath the sharp clarity of the morning sun, she has no choice but to decide.
There are three corners of a plan in her mind. Three solid stairsteps out of the sunken pit dug around her that she started to form after that night around the fire.
First, the foci must be destroyed.
If history repeats, then it should be destroyed by Inquisitor Lavallen in the final battle against Corypheus. The foci’s loss had bought them all time — even though they hadn’t known it then and there. It had delayed Solas’s plans by years, forced him to rework his efforts, to wait for an opportunity to shift into place again. If she can ensure history follows that same pattern, now, she can give Thedas that same gift.
Next, find the lyrium dagger.
It’s another matter. The memory of it stings at a place on her side where it had once struck. In the absence of the foci, Solas had sought it out after the Breach was closed. Quietly, purposefully.
Solas had purged it somehow — stripped it of its corruption. He’d wielded it himself to tear the Veil apart. She doesn’t know how he’d done it, nor where he’d found the dagger. All she knows is that it had been crucial to his plans, to the Evanuris, and she can’t let anyone reach it again.
Finally, that leaves… Solas.
She has to decide what to do with him. Even though removing him from the board would solve the more pressing timeline of her other two objectives, a cloying uncertainty in her chest keeps him placed last, and furthest from true deliberation.
Destroying the foci and the dagger are straightforward objectives. There’s no gray, no moral ambiguity in erasing tools of destruction. But Solas... he’s more than just a tool. He may be the architect of her suffering, of the world's descent into chaos, and yet...
And yet, he’d saved her.
His hands hovering over her broken body, his voice low and urgent, the faint tremble in his fingers as he’d worked to pull her from the brink of death in that cell—
“Ea’ris suvelanas’ara. Avy isalemah na.”
Those damning last words.
And still there’s no translation to be found in the tips of his ears, nor in the parting of his lips as he speaks with Mahanon and Cassandra about how best to enter Skyhold — wind tugging at the hem of his cloak.
Rook stares all the same.
She has to kill him.
Because what alternative is there? To let him live and hope he’ll falter?
She’s seen his failures before. Seen him falter, seen him make mistakes. But even in his errors, he can be brilliant, dangerous.
Solas never stumbles the same way twice.
With a bitter taste drying her mouth out, Rook ducks her head to trudge back down the mountain. Moments before his eyes make their way over to her.
[They’re a disarming shade of lilac in the morning light.]