#I hurt my own feelings :) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

evanhereonearth · 7 days ago

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I hurt my own feelings with this fic. VEILGUARD SPOILERS!

This is the prologue of Veilguard from the POV of my Inquisitor, Ilaana Lavellan, who has spent the time since Trespasser working tirelessly to change the world. Her work with the Dalish and Rivaini seers and the Avvar augurs inspired the Veil Jumpers’ formation. She is a Dreamer and she is so endlessly tired.

Now betrayed by one of her dearest friends when it mattered the most.

I stare at the letters side by side. One from a beloved friend. One from my most trusted agent, which I have just decrypted. And one…

One I have had for a week and have been expecting. If not today, soon. It’s time. And I’m already too late to make a difference.

Varric’s letter fills me with cold. Cold like the Elfsblood River in Emprise du Lion spiked with red lyrium, its rage hot against the frigid ice that has settled over my skin.

He is too smart to think I will buy it, too canny to believe I don’t have my own methods of tracking Solas—yet still, here it is, another spun tale from the man who once told me I should have lied to the Right Hand of the Divine herself when I woke in Haven with a hole in the sky and a hole in my head and a hole in my hand that could heal all three.

I read it again, my body past reacting outwardly but my ribs screaming to hold back the fury in my heart.

Inquisitor,

Greetings from miserable, rainy Minrathous! (Don't tell Dorian I called it that.) The rotten weather here is making me nostalgic for Skyhold. The mountains were freezing, but at least the air didn't smell like wet garbage.

We'll have to get in another game of Wicked Grace soon.

Harding picked up the trail again. I'd tell you not to worry, but I know how useless that is. Instead, I'll just say: I've got a great team on this. Neve could stare down the Maker, and wait until you meet Rook. They're a natural: Smart, resourceful, completely unpredictable. You'd like them, as long as you don't try to beat them at cards. Chuckles'll never know what hit him.

I'll write again once we have something solid for you. Drinks at the Hanged Man are on me when this is over. Take care of yourself.

Varric

Then I read Charter’s. Charter is Leliana’s agent and also mine, one of the few who has come face to face with Solas since the events of the Qunari Dragon’s Breath plot. I trust Leliana implicitly—she’s earned that from me, my truest friend aside from Dorian and my most steadfast partner in all my intricate work for the past decade, by my side by choice as I walk my own din’an shiral—and until five minutes ago when I got Charter’s, I also trusted Varric Tethras.

Charter’s words are brief, using only my code name and seven others she pulsed through the sending crystal only minutes ago.

Lathi,

Our Lady of Victory. Looking glass. Haste.

I’m already too late. Haste means immediately. Even if I have an eluvian directly into the centre of Minrathous, I cannot run fast enough to beat Varric to Our Lady of Victory. Morrigan cannot fly fast enough.

Varric told me not to come to Minrathous yet.

And I know, without any doubt, that he sent his message barely an hour ago; Irelin must have been holding on to it until he told her to send it.

I am frozen like that horrid river, my own Elvhen blood a block of ice in every vein. How many times have I tried to explain to Varric the stakes here? How many hours have I spent begging him to listen to anything beyond his own narrative?

Something cracks within me, and my body begins to vibrate like a hummingbird’s wings as I force myself to reread the final letter.

Vhenan, I do not know if you will see these words. My ritual is ready and will soon be set in motion. Perhaps when you read this the world will be as it once was, and you will see why all I did was necessary. I cannot ask your forgiveness, but I hope you come to understand. That night in Crestwood, when I shared the truth about your vallaslin…you do not know how close I came to breaking. I could have shared the truth, or even put my plans aside and simply stayed with you as Solas…as I wanted.

I regret the pain I caused you.

What I feel for you will never change.

This, I have read a thousand times in the days since I found it in the Crossroads. I knew he sensed me close to his Lighthouse, knew he felt as I always do when we enter each other’s orbits.

It is the closest thing to an invitation he will ever send me; Solas once pushed me from his own din’an shiral out of fear I would come to regret loving him, that his steps would poison our love and the safety we built in each other’s hearts. He knew, when he sent this letter, that he had been wrong then about my motivations—or at least that my motivations have had the time to reveal to him my truth. He remembers how I said, “Let me help you, Solas.” And he is no fool. He knows every threat to his course, every passing breeze, and he knows every deliberate step I have taken on the journey I chose for myself these last ten years. He knows it’s not for him alone; he knows my mind is my own. He also knows I am free to choose and have chosen.

And now in my own foolish trust of an old friend, I will be too late to help him after all this time. Because Varric knows if I show up at Solas’s ritual, the Void take me, it will not be to stop my love at all costs.

I take a single steadying breath. Too late or not, I have to try. He will feel me coming to him. Perhaps that will be enough.

I summon a trio of wisps as I turn and sprint for my eluvian, whispering, begging, imbuing them with all the love in my heart and praying it is enough to stall whatever Varric has set in motion with this betrayal.

***

Varric’s letter and Charter’s, I drop into the warded message box I share with Leliana and Morrigan. Morrigan is deep in Arlathan Forest with Strife and Irelin, and Leliana—Divine Victoria—is leading the entire Chantry of Southern Thedas. They will both know soon enough.

Slipping through the mirror buzzes against the surface of my skin, enveloping me in the magic of the Fade, of the in-between place that is the Crossroads. We do not have Solas’s Vi’Revas, and our small section of the eluvian network is ours at his sufferance, unacknowledged for the sake of our plausible deniability—something we are all well aware of. The wisps I summoned are already gone, whirring through the Fade to find my love with as much haste as they can muster.

Time moves differently here. My feet pound over its ancient paths, rainbows glimmering and shimmering in the raw magic that surrounds me, but I still cannot move fast enough. With a thought, I slip into wolf form; I may not truly be faster this way, but I feel faster.

The mental boost gives me strength. It is not far to the Minrathous eluvian, but what lies on the other side is the true terror in my soul. Dorian’s manor is across the city from Our Lady of Victory. Even with all the magic in Thedas, I cannot simply appear where I want to appear.

When I reach the eluvian, I launch myself through, transforming myself back into the shape of Ilaana Lavellan that the world knows as the Inquisitor.

And what I hear makes me almost trip and sprawl out onto my face.

“Citizens of Minrathous!” The voice booms through the air from the Archon’s Palace.

I don’t hear the rest of the message, because Dorian throws open the door to the warded eluvian room, pinged by the wards that recognise my mana.

“It’s started,” he says. “Ilaana—”

“Varric lied,” I tell him shortly. “Did you know?”

I’ve never heard the razor-sharp edge to my voice that slices through the air between me and my dearest friend. He gapes at me, piecing together what I’m saying as horror twists his expression before he can answer.

“Dorian, did you know?”

My voice cracks the second time, and he flinches at my anguish.

“No, Lathi. I trust you above all else in this Maker-forsaken world. Into the Fade and Beyond.”

The weary smile he gives me is enough; Dorian cannot lie to my face.

That last bit is a joke, one I didn’t know I needed in this moment. Humans call it the Fade, elves call it the Beyond, and right now, the veil between our world and the spirit world, regardless of what anyone calls it, is about to vanish. My love is trying to heal the wound he inflicted upon this world to save it so long ago. The immense trust Dorian has in me, to believe the veil falling is survivable?

I can return that trust. I will return that trust.

“I need to get to Our Lady of Victory,” I tell him, forcing the mask back on—if I am going to survive tonight, that mask will be my lifeline.

I am too late already. But I have to try. I am too late already. But for Solas, for all of us and everyone we love on both sides of the veil, I have to try.

***

It is the quiet that tells me I’m too late.

Dorian and I burst through the eluvian into the wilds of Arlathan to find it over—but the Veil still stands. In the shellshocked broken statues, in the stink of blight that stings at my nostrils in a whiff on the wind, we are late enough that the scene has grown quiet.

Not silent. The storm of magic that fills the air with the familiar feel of the Fade—Solas’s mana, so known to me, permeating every pore—remains an echo.

An argument with Varric from last month springs back into my mind.

“Varric, the veil is already failing. It will fall whether you want it or not, and only Solas knows how to do this in a way that will not release the entire reason he created it in the first place.” My temples bloomed with the headache I was nursing at the time, circular arguments that could find no purchase on the smooth, blunted surface of Varric’s stubbornness. “It’s the Blight. The blighted Evanuris, whoever of them remains. If we find him, we cannot risk their escape.”

“We don’t know that,” Varric insisted for the hundredth time. “He’s trying to drown the world in demons—we can’t just let him because you believe his propaganda.”

“I believe the decade of my own studies! Everything I have found independently on both sides of the veil confirms it, that the Evanuris created or unleashed the Blight and weaponised it. And that the veil kept them from using it to destroy the entire world. Every living being in Thedas owes Solas their very existence.”

“And he’s taking the veil down and will let the blight out again—”

“He will do no such thing! It would defeat the purpose of everything he has done so far, and you are not listening to me. You have decided, wrongly, that you understand this better than I do, better than he does, better than the Veil Jumpers and the seers, better than Morrigan, who holds the memories of Mythal herself.”

“Look, Ilaana, I know you and Chuckles were in love, but he lied to you all that time. You’re too close to this to be objective. He’s the literal god of lies.”

“Or none of the rest of you bothered to truly know him. If you had, you might have been forced to accept that he is right. You see only the version of him you wish to see; I at least can differentiate between the man and the mask he wears.”

That was it, I realise, as Dorian and I warily pick our way towards the ritual site.

That was the moment Varric decided he would keep me from this. He has always believed me to be delusional. He has always been unable to accept that he is wrong. Wrong about Cole’s personhood, wrong about Bianca. I can see him projecting that upon me; he trusted Bianca, a woman who married someone else instead of him, a woman who leaked red lyrium into the world to Corypheus, a woman who deluded him, kept him begging for scraps for years. A woman more delighted by her own cleverness than any willingness to take responsibility for her actions. He thinks my relationship with Solas is the same.

It is not and never was.

In the past decade, much of the Inquisition has fallen away. Bull hasn’t much stayed in touch since he and Dorian ended things; Tevinter became too large for Bull to deal with. He returned to the Chargers, and as far as I know is somewhere in Antiva fighting the Antaam.

Some, I know still only to keep an eye on. Like Thom and Vivienne and Sera. Others are friends I keep close but not too close, like Cass and Josie and Cullen. Varric and Lace, I have trusted until now, if not to the degree I trust Dorian and Leliana and Merrill and Morrigan, enough to trust they would listen to me and my hard-won expertise.

Folly. The folly of my too-tender heart that gave me my nickname. Da’lath’in. Lathi.

Beside me, Dorian makes a small noise. I’m so caught up in my rampaging thoughts that I stop only when he throws out an arm across my chest

“What in the blazes is that?”

I smell the Blight before my eyes process the lumpen mass I’m seeing. My first thought is that it is a womb torn out and left pulsing on the ground, its umbilical cord winding away to attach to…something worse.

My second thought is that this impression is all too correct.

I incinerate it with a thought, Dorian’s barrier protecting us from any spray of the explosion, and fire races along the umbilical cord to the larger mass, lighting it up with a gurgling pulse that makes every pore on my body raise itself into gooseflesh.

“The veil remains, but the blight got out,” I say, my voice hollow, numb.

“Lathi, if you don’t want to see this—”

“I have to.”

It comes out almost as a gasp. I take three slow breaths, trying to build myself a cocoon of calm even as something deep within my spirit begins to shriek.

Dorian burns through the barrier, and I cast about for any threats that could remain. The blight here—this is unlike any blight I have encountered. My skin crawls like it’s trying to escape from my body.

Thom alerted me some time ago to a report from Wardens who seem to have encountered an ancient elven lab beneath a mountain that birthed horrors unlike any they’d encountered. Darkspawn twisted enough to make the usual hurlocks and genlocks and shrieks look downright friendly.

I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming.

What has Varric done?

We see no actual darkspawn as we wind through the path, but that does nothing to settle my spirit. The entire place is hushed with creeping wrongness, echoes of magic like a tempest barely calmed. Or cut off abruptly.

I see footprints in the dirt. Dorian is no tracker, but I am still Dalish. Two dwarves—that’ll be Varric and Harding. One set is a boot and a hard imprint of something not a foot. Neve Gallus, most likely. She is known for having lost part of a leg much like I have lost part of an arm, though in entirely different circumstances.

One set that must be Rook’s. Grier Aldwir, a Veil Jumper who I encountered long ago in Rivain before the Veil Jumpers even existed. Not long after Dragon’s Breath, when I first ventured out to the those I thought might meet me with open minds.

Varric seems to have somehow thought I wouldn’t find out about the people he intended to take to disrupt my love’s ritual, but I admit surprise at Rook’s identity.

I would have thought Grier would have more sense.

Not that my first impression of them was anything more than passing; Grier was starstruck to be in the presence of the Inquisitor, and I noted the way they asked stupid questions that others seemed to expect of them as much as I noted the sharp intelligence behind those blue-green eyes. I recognised something of myself in that; it has often behooved me to allow others to make assumptions about my own capacity. Better people underestimate you, especially as an elf in Thedas.

The thoughts are as much distraction as anything. That shrieking part of my soul has not ceased its panicked noise.

Dorian and I pick our ways forwards still, combing the path for evidence. Some residue of demons, more blight, though the blight seems to be leading away from here, almost like tracks in and of itself. It veers off into Arlathan Forest, which is something I am likely to hear about sooner rather than later. I will get word to Irelin and Strife after we discover what happened here at this ritual.

I don’t let myself wonder about Solas. I cannot.

If I do, I will break.

We come to an old ruin, and even from where I stand, I can see the evidence of cataclysm. I have been here once before when tracking Solas, so I know that the enormous statues of the ancient Evanuris were standing not long ago.

Now only a few still stand upright; the rest have toppled like bookshelves in a library when one is pushed to fall upon the others in a cascade of destruction.

My skin grows cold even as my analytical mind puts together pieces of what must have happened.

“Surely even dwarves could not be so foolish as to drop a statue on a ritual of that magnitude of volatility,” Dorian says, his own mind making the same connection as mine. “One does not need magical acuity to understand that such a thing would—”

I waggle my prosthetic hand at him. “Have unintended consequences?”

“My dear, you are far more gracious than I.”

I am, of course, referring to my own inadvertent interruption of a ritual of a tenth this size: Corypheus sacrificing Divine Justinia to tear open the Fade. The moment I tripped and landed in the role of Herald of Andraste, later Inquisitor. The moment I fell into the Fade in the flesh and tumbled back out of it a miracle. The moment my fate became irrevocably bound to Solas’s.

“They had two mages with them, as well,” I murmur. “Dock Town’s Neve Gallus and a Veil Jumper called Grier Aldwir. Rook, as Varric calls them. Either one of them ought to have known better.”

“Neve certainly should have,” Dorian murmurs. “I don’t know her well, but enough to know she doesn’t take chances. That said, she has not had the benefit of knowing someone who lives and breathes the Fade, let alone two someones. Three if we count Cole.”

“Even so,” I say shakily. My ability to compartmentalise is cracking along its fault lines.

“Even so,” Dorian agrees.

I can feel spirits pressing against the veil, drawn to me as always. Especially when there has been enormous magic brought to bear, and there has been more enormous magic brought to bear here than any time in history since the day Solas made the veil itself.

“Dorian.”

He pulls his gaze from the toppled statues to look at me, his own demeanour showing he’s as aware of the activity in the Fade as much as I am.

“Don’t worry,” he says, a sardonic smile quirking his lips without reaching his eyes as he quotes a line he once said to me when we were torn out of time in a red lyrium nightmare of Redcliffe. “I’ll protect you.”

He knows I need to see.

We both know I may not be able to bear it.

***

A decade of practice has made slipping across the veil into the Fade as simple as lighting a candle with my magic.

It feels like home here, and that thought wrenches a yearning sob from me at my decade-long hope crushed.

“Imagine a world where the Fade is not somewhere you go, but a state of nature, like the wind. Where spirits are as common as trees or grass.”

Solas’s words to me, a lifetime ago in Haven.

My first wild glimmer of possibility.

The spirits around me reflect my sorrow, my fear, but they know me. They know me or know of me, and they do not turn into demons when my emotions are stormy; instead, they pull close around me. Compassion and Valour and Courage and Determination.

“Show me,” I whisper to my friends.

The world of now falls away.

I feel the germination of Solas’s ritual, feel his magic grow, spreading in undulating waves from where he stands atop a ritual platform raised on a flight of stone-hewn stairs.

The sight of him wrenches at my heart. Oh, I have had glimpses of him over the years; we are ghosts of the wolves I carved for him in Skyhold so long ago, always circling each other, never without each other’s scents. I have seen him echoed in memories in the Fade, regrets and tears, his and my own both, seen him in truth, from afar, gazing upon me and allowing for scattered moments of longing we both knew must be brief. Whether as a wolf or a man, I know him always, as he knows me. He has never hidden from me, nor I from him.

But seeing him in this memory, only a bare hour or two ago, is different.

His name means both Pride and One Who Stands Tall, and in this moment, it is only the latter the spirits see. Thus it is only the latter I see. The spirits are here, and they are ready, because he has prepared them for this. Pride blooms in me—pride that my love has not an army, but a tribe thousands strong of spirits ready to help—spirit self seeing self—ready to heal the wound he inflicted on the world, ready to help the bone knit back together after it has been re-broken and reset.

They know the risks. They know what lies beyond the door.

Corruption and death.

For all of us.

Still, they are here, and they are ready.

The scope of Solas’s power staggers me as it grows. It eclipses the ritual site, so much raw magic it is as if the veil already does not exist. This—this is what remained of a fragment of Mythal?

My own power is not negligible; my connection to the Fade has grown to the point that I am virtually untouchable to anyone who tries to harm me.

But this?

No wonder the Evanuris convinced the ancient Elvhen that they were gods.

I can also feel that it reaches the limits of his strength.

He has been counted among them, but he has never been their peer.

Yet he bested them anyway.

Magic, raw and awe-inspiring, pours out of the Fade, permeating the earth, the ritual site, the air, everything for miles around. It is a beacon of pure power to anything with an awareness, anything with a connection to the Fade and, I suspect, even to anything without.

I’m so caught up in the torrent of energies that I almost miss Varric’s approach.

Not all spirits have the fortitude to resist change in the face of such enormous magical shifts; some few, so desperate to reunite with the physical world the veil sundered them from, tear their way through the tattered veil, the violence of it twisting them into demons on the way. Like with the rifts I spent years closing with the Anchor. Like the Breach.

Varric and his team fight their way through. Neve is an adept ice mage, her mana elegant and efficient. Rook is electric, using the newly emerged orb-and-dagger fighting style rather than a staff like I prefer, and their attacks seem fitting to what Varric said in his letter about the eponymous chess piece: thinking in straight lines.

The observation fills me with dread.

I don’t want to see this. I do not want to witness.

I have no choice.

I owe him this, because Varric fooled me, and I was too late to stop it. If I allow myself to freeze in inaction with my own regrets now, I will never leave this place.

Even as I think it, I hear Varric’s voice.

“All right,” he says to Rook. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Are you sure?” Neve asks after blasting away a demon who ventured too close.

“Positive. You three just keep the demons off me while I talk to him.”

“Varric,” a breathless Lace Harding cuts in, “Solas isn’t going to stop just because an old friend asks nicely.”

“Solas needs someone to sell him another option, to justify him changing his mind.” Varric sounds so sure of himself, and the sheer weight of knowledge that he left me behind on purpose threatens to capsize me.

I miss what Rook says in the flash of fury that nearly blinds me, but Grier must be encouraging Varric, because Varric’s answer adds fuel to my fire.

“Thanks, Rook. Whatever else he is, he’s my friend. And if he won’t listen to me, he’ll hear from Bianca.”

No. No, no, no, no, no-no-no.

I cannot think of a worse way to approach Solas at this moment, but I cannot stop it from happening.

It has already happened. Already brought this night to ruin.

“Hey, Chuckles! Hope I’m not interrupting!”

Visions in the Fade shift perspective, and I’m suddenly between Varric and Solas, looking up at my love when he turns to face the fool of a dwarf. I have not seen Solas this close since Dragon’s Breath, and all the air leaves my lungs as his face shifts through a hundred micro expressions from one heartbeat to the next.

Weariness. Genuine surprise. A glance behind Varric—looking for me and not seeing me—turning to anger as my instincts scream that my love, my vhen’an’ara, has correctly deduced in that moment that Varric is why I am not with him.

And finally, rage, quickly pushed down.

My ears ring as their fragmented conversation continues, as Varric barrels ahead with Bianca levelled at Solas’s heart.

At my heart. My heart. My heart.

Vhenan.

Bianca shatters as Solas destroys the unique crossbow with a thought, leaving Varric untouched. Solas lifts his ritual dagger once more to the ritual.

“People are always dying, Varric,” Solas says in answer to something I did not hear, the weight of an eternity on every word, “it is what they do.”

The spirits around me wrap me in what comfort they can, soothing Compassion and stalwart Courage tethering me to my own existence so I don’t shatter like that fucking crossbow.

Worse is coming. If Varric is here, he didn’t bring down the statues.

Even as I think it, I hear Rook’s voice.

“We need a better plan.”

Then Harding: “Do you want me to take the shot?”

I cannot allow myself to feel this additional betrayal. No part of me cares that they genuinely think they are the good guys here; they are wrong, so deeply wrong and will never know it.

“Won’t work,” Neve is saying. “He’s too powerful.”

“What if we disrupt the ritual?” Rook says, pointing…at the statues.

I cannot listen to them, to this asinine stupidity, this mockery of heroism. “Please,” I beg the spirits. “Don’t make me hear them.”

I already know what they are going to do; I only don’t know how it ends.

One more message, says a spirit of Valour. Be brave.

Solas’s voice. “We shared a journey years ago. Do you think I would do this if there were some other, better option? You came a long way and made a valiant effort, but this story does not end with my downfall.”

Some part of me unclenches. A wave of gratitude encompasses Valour; the spirit would not have echoed those words except to bolster me.

Banal nadas, whispers Possibility in my ear. Banal nadas.

Nothing is inevitable. The lesson Possibility came to teach me so long ago.

I see the first statue begin to fall.

It cracks through the air, breaking stone shattering, stone that has stood for millennia. The statue crashes into the next one, then the next.

I don’t have to hear Solas to know he is screaming, “No. No, no!”

He catches the closest statue with pure will, hefting it backwards from where it is about to crash down upon him. Resolute, implacable. He raises his dagger once more—and Varric throws himself at Solas.

I watch them tussle, Varric with his mere few decades of experience against the Dread Wolf, who has commanded armies and outwitted would-be gods for ages untold.

It is only ever going to end one way, and Varric has reached the final boundary of Solas’s forbearance and patience.

The dagger plunges into Varric’s chest, above the heart but a mortal wound nonetheless.

My body is shaking, shuddering with the sight of it, but my emotions are too numb, too jumbled; this isn’t over. This isn’t the end.

Then I see it.

Behind Solas.

A tear in the veil, like that rift into the Fade at Adamant, and like that rift, horror waits on the other side.

One form I immediately recognise from his iconography, and if I didn’t recognise that, I would know the sheer force of his presence.

Elgar’nan, first of the Evanuris.

His power is a force that cannot be contained or reckoned with; the weight of it has density, the enormity of his will threaded with something I only just tasted.

Blight.

Beside him is…a monster. My first thought is that perhaps it is Andruil, whose Void-touched armour drove her insane. This gangly, long-limbed creature dangling tentacles—but no.

No.

This is Ghilan’nain.

Mother of the fucking halla, my Dalish arse. Mother of monsters. Mother of nightmares.

A cataclysmic concussion rends the air. Dimly, I am aware of Rook soaring into a pillar with the sheer force of it.

I cannot see Solas. I cannot see Solas. I cannot see Solas.

Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain are out.

The blighted gods are out.

Varric, what have you done?

I don’t realise I’m screaming myself hoarse until hands shake my shoulders. Human hands. Dorian’s hands.

He pulls me back to the present, out of the Fade. I taste blood where I have chewed through the inner flesh of my cheek.

Through the Fade, the spirits push one more message through to me. It is a message for me, from them. To tell me my love lives. I feel with it a sense of terror beyond anything I have imagined. Beyond the lair of the Nightmare at Adamant, beyond the mind-breaking horrors of seeing a blighted Solas tossed dead on the floor in a future that never came to pass, beyond the pitiful ploy for godhood that was Corypheus, beyond anything I’ve faced since.

The message comes from within the prison he built to contain the blighted gods.

It comes with the force of my love’s voice resonant with terrible calm in every word—words meant not for me, but for someone else.

For Rook.

“You have no idea what you have done.”

#I hurt my own feelings #solavellan #solas #veilguard spoilers #solas x female lavellan #da4 spoilers #solas x inquisitor

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