#so i guess solas at some point goes around and collects what remains of the evanuris

[dreadfutures]

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away." from Ozymandias for Dirthamen & Pride?

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

For @dadrunkwriting

Rating: T

Warnings: Gore, horror elements

Characters: Solas, Amarok (Regret), and what was once Dirthamen.

Words: 698

-:-:-

This land is yet familiar to Solas, though its scattered and decrepit state is no comfort to him for that familiarity. He processes solemnly through the wrecked and ruined fragments of Empire, his critical eye discarding each reminder as soon as he sees them: Andraste's crowned head and cupped hands float away from each other, lopsided and akimbo, leaving eddies in the green-tinged air, while Avvar statues collect screams, to sate the Despair and Fear demons who might have otherwise plagued their lands. Fear, or the Nightmare as it had taken to calling itself, had collected these offerings and embedded them all across its lands.

The demon itself was nowhere to be found, and its absence had taken a toll on the harsh ecosystem here in the Fade. No new dreamers found themselves trapped in dark, muddy corner, and Pride and Terror and Despair were more scarce here now than they had been when Solas fell with the Inquisitor into the Fade at Adamant.

But a negative force still lay claim to these lands, a vague awareness following Solas as he journeyed deep into the heart of Fear's Domain.

He pushed away well-meaning spirits who wished to take up residence here, or to come to his aid to cleanse this realm of rot and ruin. He did not need their assistance, but they wished to offer solidarity, comfort, for what they sensed was to come—a confrontation, a culmination, the end of something aeons in the making.

But this was what remains: bloody Regret, crumbling stone, and a vast abyss of Fade-touched rock unfit for inhabitation, unsuitable for growth, poisonous to all things bright and beautiful.

He found it at last amid a river of blood: a singular statue bowed low, posed high above an altar of blood sacrifice. To the untrained eye it might seem Tevinter in make, with its black burnished metal fixtures and shackles, its threatening angles, but Solas knew better. The scavengers of the Imperium had stumbled across only the ruins of Elvhenan, its refuse, and claimed them mistakenly as treasures.

How different might this world have been, had they come across the more precious remnants of the lost Empire—found instead the beauty that Solas also shattered, in saving his people from themselves.

Solas stopped at the mouth of the clearing, his mouth pulled down in harsh, sad lines at the sight before him. The white wolf he had watched grow from naught but a wisp-made-corporeal, into a true Hold Beast worthy of honor, lay limply on the black altar of sacrifice. It had lost a great deal of fur, raw and open wounds left behind, and what remained was soaked nearly black with blood—and Blight. For standing on the other side of the altar was a black eluvian rippling with attention, and from its void-like surface poured filth that fed the red lyrium all around them.

Amarok—or what remained of the wolf who had been Regret—raised his head in an unnatural fashion, as though pulled by independent strings. Its hollow eye sockets glowed with another's intelligence, red and green instead of the blue fire that had once found residence there

"IS THIS WHAT MY DEATH PAID FOR, DREAD WOLF?" a voice rasped from somewhere within the wolf, but no mortal voicebox could manufacture such a sound, like the purest sorrow, and the bitterest regret. That was what had done it, Solas thought. Regret.

"WASTELANDS OF DREAM AND WAKING BORN DESPOTS, THE PEOPLE SCATTERED LIKE MINNOWS STARTLED BY A DISLODGED STONE?"

"I had thought," Solas replied softly, "that was all that remained. But there is more, lethallin. There is more."

A hunger arose then around him, as wide and vast as the sea. Aeons of blindness, darkness, beyond the worst his imagination could conjure, had left his old friend with nothing but itself to eat. And now, through Solas, it might satisfy its hunger with a taste of so much more.

But the shadow remained silent, writhing behind the carcass of Regret.

"You know why I am here," Solas said. "Ir abelas. Malas amelin ne halam. It is time for you to un-become."

The darkness shivered.

"I AM READY… PRIDE."