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evanhereonearth · 2 months ago

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Ilaana thinks she knows, but she doesn’t.

She will.

From Halamshiral to Halamshiral, she traces the lines between the map of hints, learning, always learning. A stray word from Cole, her intuition strong enough to work out the impossible secret her love was hiding and instincts loud enough to scream that if his secret were simply names, he would have told her here.

From Halamshiral to Halamshiral.

“I do adore the heady blend of power, intrigue, danger, and sex that permeates these events,” from the mouth of Fen’Harel the night she lets an empress die for the genocide committed against an alienage.

Through the Temple of Mythal, through the whispers of the well, through Morrigan explaining the ancient elves to the ancient elves themselves, her love among them, through Crestwood when he walks away, through the second Breach and broken orbs, through her naked face where Mythal’s vallaslin once lay like spring green upon her skin, through Wisdom to Pride and back again, into the depths of the titan’s truth, through his silence in the blue glow of lyrium, through Ameridan and Telana dreaming, dreaming, searching, grieving.

From Halamshiral to Halamshiral, quiet whispers in the Inquisition as spies from outside trip over one another, no sign of Solas except what she senses in waking and in dreams, that there has to be more, and everything she has pieced together points to the veil.

“What would you have me do?”

“I would have had you trust me!”

She thinks she knows, but she doesn’t. She still doesn’t know. There is a difference between knowing and knowing, and she is still years off knowing.

“Let me help you, Solas.”

“I cannot do that to you, vhenan.”

“But you would do it to yourself? I cannot bear to think of you alone.”

“I walk the din’an shiral. There is only death on this journey. I would not have you see what I become.”

She thinks she knows. She will learn what she does not know.

But he also thinks he knows. He will learn too.

Banal nadas. Ar lath, ar lath, ar lath.

He takes her arm; he frees her from the Well’s compulsion, what remained after he broke the unwitting bondage of her vallaslin. She feels something different but does not understand what, not yet.

From Halamshiral to Halamshiral and then beyond. Into the depths of the Fade, seeking as he taught her to seek. Into the depths of the earth, seeking as he feared she would seek. Into the depths of her heart, seeking a truth he dared not seek himself.

Echoes of a dead empire.

Spirits who know his names.

Memories. Remnants.

Those she does not trust fall away. Varric she lets return to Kirkwall, where she visits, pushing at the edges of his stubbornness where she can, fruitless against what he feels to be true about the world. Vivienne she keeps as close as an enemy should be, Vivienne who front-loads her barriers and calls Cole a demon because she understands so little in her expertise. Sera she helps flit away, never challenging, never letting closer than a prank or two.

Cullen, she treats with gentleness. She helps him with his templars, teaches them a softer side of magic, how to breathe through their fear, why their blood sings out for connection to something they don’t understand, how they can find that connection in transcending the terror. Tiny challenges, chips in the bulwark of the Chantry’s prison of lyrium, slow healing with the hand of a friend between their shoulder blades.

The Seekers sow new seeds with Cassandra, and she helps them, too. Helps them understand that their existence is intrinsically touched by the Fade, that their discipline and their training circumvents the fears of the templars to remake them, shows them that their incorruptibility is built upon the foundation of spirits who are and always have been here to help.

She sends Thom on with grace, receives a griffon feather in a letter, closes her eyes against the knowledge of the Wardens’ weaknesses and prays that little feather is a symbol of rebirth.

She seeks from Amaranthine to the Anderfels, from the Avvar to Antiva, and she finds out, crumb by crumb and step by step, what she didn’t know in Crestwood. What she didn’t know the day the Anchor almost killed her.

Cole comes to her to say goodbye, lets her see him back to the Fade. “I need to go where I’m needed the most,” he says, and she knows who he means and sends him with a message in the form of Compassion.

She shares this only with Merrill and Leliana and Dorian, and that only reluctantly. Trust grows with their sharing of knowledge. A circle within the inner circle, and when the Iron Bull can no longer tolerate Dorian’s growing trials in Tevinter, Dorian lets him go with the Chargers, to a simpler life without the Qun but without fear of what may be coming next. She holds Dorian while he weeps, as he has held her so many times.

They walk this path together.

Josephine connects her to places her remaining hand could not otherwise reach, annals and archives locked behind luxury and privilege. Josie knows there is much she herself does not know, but the Inquisitor is an arrow fired from a bowstring stretched between two points in time at Halamshiral, and while Josie may not understand, something in her whispers that she must trust.

The Dalish feel so distant to Ilaana now, but she goes to them. She goes to Keeper Hawen in the Exalted Plains, to Keeper Deshanna and Clan Lavellan, to the Arlathvhen and gathered clans, to the Dalish who have faded into forests. She shares what she can, knowledge gleaned from walking the Fade just as he did in the Inquisition. Some chase her away as she tells them the truth of their gods, sometimes with words, sometimes with arrows.

But some listen.

Whispers reach her over the years of some few vanishing, of ventures into Arlathan Forest, of villages.

And that is where Morrigan finds her.

Like Ilaana, Morrigan has been humbled by learning she did not know what she was sure she knew.

“You were justified in making me the fool,” Morrigan says to her one night as they observe the fledgling Veil Jumpers, unseen by the elves. “And you were justified in demanding the Well.”

Morrigan is…more now. A fragment of Mythal. She tries once to compel Ilaana, at Ilaana’s bidding, and fails. Ilaana’s triumph feels hollow, regardless of the relief.

“Fen’Harel was adept at breaking every bond but his own,” Morrigan murmurs. “But to be certain your will is your own, allow me to release you from my service.”

There is nothing left to release, but in that moment, Ilaana finds another ally.

“I would not see him fall,” Morrigan tells her softly. “’Tis monstrous to mould Wisdom into a weapon. I have her memories, tempered by lives lived through a human lens. I would make what amends I can.”

She is beginning to know.

The moment of epiphany comes on the back of betrayal, as it so often does.

Precious possibilities stolen from her soul, Solas all but lost in an instant, and oh, what follows is knowledge.

She walks the trail of the Evanuris, released rabid from their prison, watches the monsters they leave in their wake. She watches as an unrelenting nightmare blooms in blight from Arlathan to Antiva and beyond, and she cannot stay her hand.

Ten years of searching, seeking, learning. Ten years of quiet coded messages, of desperate trust, of Dorian and Leliana and Morrigan and Merrill and Hawke. Ten years of rebuilding Ferelden, Orlais, the Free Marches. Ten years of midwifing the birth of elven rights and free mages. Ten years of defending those left defenceless while powers parade about in privilege and audacity. Ten years of learning, living, bleeding.

Ten years of messages left in the Fade for one who will find them, in hope he would hear them. Ten years of trying. Ten years of deciding. Ten years of indomitable focus.

And now…ruin.

Rivers roiling with blight, Antaam and Venatori making a mockery of the red lyrium fever dream Corypheus brought to Redcliffe: a real nightmare is born when the blight takes Denerim. Hard-won recover bashed to bits against boils of poison and death. The healing herbs of the Hinterlands she once gathered for refugees wither where nowt will grow again.

Ten years of fighting for the people of this world turned to ash in a matter of weeks.

Ten minutes of fidgeting, waiting for the person who loosed it on the world to wade into a truth she’s waited ten years to tell. Dorian held her again, held her together, preparing to let her go even now but holding her close just a little longer. He has been beside her, always. He knows.

So she sits down with Rook to talk, to sow seeds of hope. Not to shame, not to blame—those impulses, Ilaana keeps locked away. She dances around the topic as if tiptoeing, watching Rook’s amusement turn to genuine surprise at Ilaana’s words.

“Or maybe I’m the prideful one, imagining his broken heart so that I never have to face my folly: that I loved someone who made such grave mistakes. That I may love him still.”

Twisting her words like he does, the truth twining between hedging phrases that bury the ache of her bone-deep exhaustion. She will save this world first, clean up someone else’s mess yet again, but now…only now does she finally know.

Why he walked away. Why following had to be her will and hers alone. Why he would not do such a thing to his heart, to allow her to follow when she did not know what she does now.

So she fights. And she waits. For a little while longer.

To show him she is not alone. To show him he is not alone. Ten years for her to hear the truth in what he told her once.

“If you are cracking, vhenan, it is does not mean you are about to shatter, but that you are about to be reborn.”

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