Chapter Text
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Winter’s grasp breaks over Thedas not on its snow topped trees, but in the budding dreams of its people. They thaw, as do visions of wiggling stubborn tubers from the earth, and the soft sprouts of elf root and wild lavender; of birds and fish returning to their rivers, ready to fatten up among the cattails. Of trout in nets. Crabs in pots. The constant drip of melting ice beats within every hopeful Fereldan heart, every Orlesian trapper, every smiling Marcher.
He stands beside a windmill floating above the blooming Fade. One hand flat against its chalky white stones, the other gripping a weathered staff. A man on an island, watching the horizon.
“Perhaps I already knew the answer, I was just not ready to accept the truth.” Solas says to the figure next to him.
Six years have passed since sustaining the Veil with his own life. A limb he cannot see. A sense he cannot name. It’s frailty, compounding with his own.
“It is you, isn’t it?” Solas asks.
Rook, half cast against the air, solid as a wisp of smoke, simply stares. They will not answer. He knows this.
“Haunt elsewhere, or I shall cut you loose.” Solas warns.
He calls upon the Fade, slipping away to better dreams. Kinder ones. Leaving Rook behind.
—
Solas walks with wisps and dreamers, punishes mages who reach too far, and trims demons whose terrors grow uncountable; a gardener of powers. Trimming. Plucking. Watering. Wards go up along his path, a nonsense trail of carefully woven magic.
The Fade thrums around him. The taste of Blight has mostly left his teeth. Solas endures.
Rook’s face watches, an unwelcome shadow. Ever silent.
—
The fragment wasn’t always so present.
In the beginning, it was nothing more than a cloud of inky dark hair in the corner of his eye. The jangle of familiar gear. A flash of burgundy like a ribbon in the wind, just beyond sight. A spirit making games, he dismisses, simply chasing Solas as he wanders.
It happens like this:
He senses them first in the pitch and drop of a storm rolling over, curling in his chest. A quiver of the heart. Then, a sudden overwhelming sound. Magic rings like struck metal against the Veil, sonorous, pounding, sending Solas to his knees.
Afterimages and whispers draw into a fever pitch, then burst as if pulled in too fine a point. Wild magic scatters like falling snow, like ash. He blinks, looks up.
“Rook.”
The name is torn from his throat no easier than shards of glass. They stand across a stream of babbling memories, leaning hard against the trunk of a squat and twisted elm. Thinner than smoke, a shadow of a ghost.
Rook's face reads pensive as it peers down at him. Their fingers are stained red from berries, they suck each clean one by one.
Act, you fool. His body screams, but by the time Solas summons his dagger they’re gone, long elsewhere—as if never having existed at all. A bad dream, less than a Nightmare. A vexation of the Fade.
Sunlight breaks like an invading power through the cracks in the canopy. It spills into the verdant cradle of soft and nurturing spirits around the grotto, who’ve now noticed Solas and his dagger.
A weapon.
The spirits flee, scared away by the object so antithetical to their nature. A rush of hot shame crawls down his spine.
He forgets himself.
Solas whisks away the dagger. There was no danger here. You know what I like about you, Chuckles? Your boundless optimism.
Dread thrashes in his belly like a wounded animal, persistent, biting.
—
Mainly, he tries to ignore them.
He indulges in the sleep of fishermen drawn to the Storm Coast’s jagged headland for harbor, nestling in a cave. Longboats lay strapped to boulders further inland.
Even reflected in the Fade the coastline’s wind battered cliffs were unmistakable, a black and unflinching wall against the tide. Memories press behind his eyelids. The constant dampness in his shoe. Pickled herring, slippery on the way down. Days spent as the nights were—cold and wet, putrid kelp rotting just beyond the tents. Pawn to E4. Solas sighs.
Rook is there when he turns, looking ghoulish. A weak flicker of satisfaction washes over him at their sorry state: soaked to the bone, kohl running down their cheeks, glowering like they were trying to obliterate him with their mind. No one asked you to follow. Solas thinks, snide. Reap what you sow.
Taking one last look out on the line of cliffs rising against the Waking Sea, Solas considers. A choice tumbles around in his mind like a pebble in the tide, smoothing into an indulgent shape. The easing sighs of the sea are a comforting rhythm, doubt pulls away with the water. Froth throws itself against the rocky shore in lines of pearls, a detail noted by the eyes of a slumbering fisherman.
When Solas turns back to Rook he gives them a nod, half-smile keenly grim.
They shift, beads of rain fall with the sudden motion. He sees the spark of recognition in Rook’s flint eyes, immediately attuned to his shift in demeanor.
You know me. It’s an admission given bitterly.
Rook seems ready to slip away, off to that nowhere place, but Solas’s magic is faster. He clamps down on that cursed blood magic from so long ago, pulling it taught. The bond is faint, frayed, strained in a scatter of directions. Rook’s ravaged it. He thinks. Not weak enough, however, to keep him from his work. Solas was finished playing along with this farce of a haunting. Magic ignites from his blood to theirs, a single current. Bond flaring, it flashes white, magic cracks against his mind like the steel end of a pommel.
A memory.
Red mixing with orange, sand in every crack of armor, rubbing the skin raw. The Imperial Highway cuts across the landscape like a scar. An ancient fortress across the expanse is half digested by the sands, sinking, beneath the easing sun. I need to write Neve. Apologize. Tomorrow’s the memorial, isn’t it? Only one more day out in the dunes. One more day till the real job starts. A bruise stings down to the rib bone. When they grit their teeth, sand is there too. One day. One day. A chant, an anchor.
Where was that? His head feels ready to burst.
As if through a layer of cotton he hears the groan and crash of earth. Every sense scattered in the shock of magic. Solas jams his eyes shut, rubbing the starbursts away. Gales beat around them as the Storm Coast crumbles piece by piece. He moves without thinking, trying to stabilize the dream, and in an instant Solas realizes his mistake.
His attention slipped from Rook. A fool lost to his sentimentality.
They take the opening, he would’ve done the same.
A wet hand is on him, clammy fingertips pressing into his face like a crown of brands.
The Storm Coast falls away.
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He’s thousands of years younger and all rising action and earnest convictions.
Palms pet down his hair at a soothing, even tempo. In a week's time the sides will be cropped tight by his own dagger — an arrow is falling. There are so many things he needs to say. So many secrets to confide. Rebellion creeps, murmuring in the shadows, rising to a boil. Wake up. The bathhouse always smelled of incense and rosemary, the heady minerals of the water. It laps against his skin, leaving a ring of cold. Wake up. Head swirling with foggy bliss, he lets himself be pulled into her chest. A piece of flotsam washing ashore. He’s so relieved to see her, so relieved it scares him. Why? He can’t remember.
It hasn’t happened yet.
“The talks will suffer without your console.” Hands weave around Solas’s jaw, thumbs against the peaks of his cheekbones. It’s so hard to see her face even though it hangs above him like the moon.
“And I shall not.” He’s glib.
“Solas, we must try.”
He laughs meanly at that. “To what end? Shall I dance along and play pleasantly the fool for another century? I cannot speak to those blood-drunk charlatans about decency and goodness when they have none.”
“The people—”
“The people need more. I am sorry. No.”
“Don’t you see?" Her voice is urgent. "If we are over-eager, it is us who the ones we toil to aid will raise their steel against. And make no mistake, they will believe it to be righteous. Protecting the people will become like fighting the tide, is that what you desire?”
WAKE UP.
He reaches up to touch her face. “Mythal—”
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There isn’t an inch of him that doesn’t ache as he’s thrown back to the Coast.
Down to every nerve, every sinew, and each throbbing joint there’s pain. Swallowing it, furiously blinking blurry eyes, his head snaps up. Rook is still there, like a nightmare, like they know exactly what they’ve done.
The dagger is tight in his hand without so much as a thought. In that moment he is hollow, singular, nothing but a deafening roar of grief. Solas lunges.
Rook is not moving out of the way.
It’s a trap, it’s clearly a trap. Rook goaded him and that’s every reason to get a hold of himself before—he doesn’t care.
Rook had chosen the perfect ghost, their cruelty was devastatingly effective.
He remembers, distantly, a conversation they once shared in the Prison. I have absolute faith in your ability to aggravate enemies who should know better than to underestimate you. It’s his own voice he hears, as he drags the singing lyrium edge of the dagger across their chest.
Rook’s expression twists into a sneer of gruesome satisfaction—As if he’s done exactly as expected, and was all the worse for it. He watches as their specter dissolves, scattering mists.
Then, agony. He staggers, falls. A frozen cut opens across his chest, a mirror of the one he gave the elf’s specter. Its magic seeps into the deep marrow of his bones, like a blizzard ripping through his veins. He gasps. Gags. The taste of Blight flairs under his tongue, fresh as it had been above the rooftops in Minrathous.
Reap what you sow. Solas could almost laugh.
His vision muddles, and it isn’t until salt tangs on his lips that Solas realized he'd shed tears at all.
White surf beats against the cliffs, again and again and again. The sound lingers long after the dream fades.
—
They return after three long, shivering weeks.
Rook marches in front of his view as the Fade draws itself around them. Fists on their hips they stomp around, waving off a landscape of wonders with a dull, mollified look on their face. Much more interested in finding a proper place to sit. Solas’s knife hand itches. It passes.
The cold and hollowness might fade, its memory did not.
—
He watches them because he must, gathering a litany of suspicious observations.
Rook stands straighter than they did six years past. Sturdier now. Their shoulders roll subconsciously at times, as if shifting to better bear an invisible weight. A burden that could not be measured, he’d hazard a guess, in pounds or ounces, but in days past since the war. A new shock of grey streaks down the left of their skull, a bolt of lightning.
Lazing about, they’ve extended their body across the bottom of the ferry. Its ancient prow cuts through the sky at a smooth and steady pace. Twisting light eddies off the oar as Solas uses it to gently push forward.
Lately, Rook disappears for longer and longer.
Stretches pass that make Solas question if he’d been hallucinating all along. And it’s a strange habit, unsettling, to expect shadows that aren’t there. Maybe it was madness, a slow poison finally there to collect its due.
His eyes flicker down to their prone form. A hand presses against their forehead, as if to cool a fever.
A slight quiver trembles along their throat, like a bird fluttering beneath the skin. Rook twitches. A jerk, then they’re seizing, flopping onto their side in doubling fits.
“Rook?”
It's a useless thing to say.
The cough doesn’t relent. Rook’s tongue hangs as they choke, like they're trying to upend their own intestines. They retch, bile paints the cracked grey wood. Gasping. Clawing at their throat. Not once did a sound escape.
Rook wipes the drool from their chin and catches him in an unflinching stare. It reminds him who this was. Who those eyes like two chips of flint, sparking along something deep and untouchable, belonged to.
Do not be fooled. A warning to himself.
Solas dips the oar into the sky, unsettled.
—
“When we come in contact, I am thrown into the past. I wondered, at first, if it was a conscious manipulation of the Fade’s energies on our blood magic. After some thought, projection seems most likely.” Solas prattles. “You are no mage. Reflecting your current metaphysical state through the bond would be more natural than reconstructing another’s memories yourself.”
If not haunting after him, the elf was likely drifting, unmoored, castaway in their own memory. They’ve been jettisoned from their body, this much was easy enough to discern. The rest? A vague collection of guesses and smudges on the Veil.
And the effort on Rook’s part to communicate or fix their situation remained nonexistent.
It infuriates him endlessly.
Rook is trudging after him at the base of a cracked mountain. Wagon sized skeletons litter the barren dreamscape, which makes the journey forward a constant weave and scramble.
“Unless you’ve acquired an acute mastery of the Fade? Ah, what a shame you are indisposed to correct me.”
Solas almost-grins, clearly smug, not sorry at all.
A shadow pulls across them both like a curtain. He looks up, as does Rook, their wild curls twisting like a flag. Squinting against the flickering slots of light, a flock of wisps carry a rib cage across the quivering sky.
“I would avoid such a place myself.” He confides in them, following the bones.
Was Rook growing weaker pulling themself through the bond, or was something else at play? Draining them? It’s unlike any magical break he’s seen before. A stone sits in his belly. Dread.
“Rook, what happened to you?”
The tensile sensation of their presence against the Veil bends, twangs in an undefinable direction. Solas looks back, and realizes he is alone.
—
“The next artifact should not be much further now, if I recall.”
Solas holds aside the long sweeping branches of a willow curtained over the path ahead. A mismatched trail of flat planks stretches ahead, worn smooth. It’s been twelve days since they disappeared. The question sits like a stone on top of his tongue, unrepeated.
Their boots drag, one after the other, as if leadened, each step a monumental effort. Clammy sweat pearls across their brow, he notices. Odd.
“Effusive as ever, Rook.” He carps as they shuffle past.
Rook makes it two steps onto the path before collapsing.
—
The Veil snags and frays at hardly more than a concentrated whim in the thinnest places, and presses down like a thick layer of peat at the heaviest. After the Breach. After losing Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nan. After him. All that remained of it was a mass of gnarled fibers, all gaps and lumps of fraying thread. Seven lives once nourished the hungry curtain of the Veil, then two, now one—a stream, down to a trickle.
Now, there was simply not enough ancient magic in the world to save it.
This should be a comfort; the Veil would shatter, destined to grow too brittle for its own weight. He should be relieved.
“I warned you it was inevitable, the Evanuris’ crumbling prison was proof of this end.” Solas says bitterly, weaving magic back into the Veil.
Rook remains coolly unimpressed. They’re propped up against an ancient archway, ivy that glimmered iridescent curling around the crude blocks. He watches their chest rise up and down in big, deliberate breathes, each mouthful of air a laborious task. Rook was getting worse.
“This has been nothing but a practice in futility from the start. I suppose it must be disappointing, considering the lengths you went.” Solas sighs, his insides froth with regret and resignation. Rook is flickering in and out of sight. “But you wanted your Veil, so you shall have it until the end.”
Over the distant misty hills rolls a caravan of machines, bellowing long columns of acrid smoke. Four years ago they’d appeared in the Fade, cutting grim trails across the dreamscapes. Always traveling in a neat line, one after the next; each stood two stories tall and rolled on spiked wheels the size of men. One could be mistaken for a church with its ribbed vaults and pointed arches peaked with chimneys, but he knew wiser. These were crematoriums, entirely cast in lightless iron.
In the waking world they were pulled by teams of Fereldan Chargers, drifting from one Blighted village to the next, burning the dead. Here there are no bodies, no horses to pull them, no men to mind the furnaces, and so the they roam, hungry, a memory with no purpose.
Black chariots. The name had passed between worlds.
“A century is all I can promise.” He was a powerful mage, but all cups ran dry eventually.
Inert, they stare after the chariots, still as the grave, as if some unspoken pact will break if they look away. . Solas suspects a few reasons, all bad.
“There is time.” Solas says, too distantly to be a comfort.
Rook might’ve nodded, the slightest tilt. Their gaze is cast in hazy colors by the Fade, still following the inky dots of the caravan.
—
Ever distant and ever waiting, the Black City looms; a hateful sun, a promise.
“Someone will come soon.” Solas posits. For you. About you. The first time he’s spoken in days. "The Fade is trembling in anticipation. Can you feel it?"
Rook looks down from their perch atop a dragon skull. Red grass pushes and sighs around them endlessly, like a dart of crimson silk thrown open. Solas earned a rather poisonous glare from them, as he sometimes did when reminding Rook of his existence.
“A Mortalitasi. A Veil Jumper. Your deadly Crow or valiant Warden…” Solas lists their companions one by one, plucking each name like the petals of a flower. “I imagine you worry what I will offer your friends first: lies or trickery.”
They shrug and turn away. Silence, as always, his only answer.
Solas frowns. “Where is your desire to escape this, Rook?”
Rook doesn’t even bother to look at him, composure breaking like a pane of glass. Laughter quakes their body. He can imagine its damning, cruel sound on the wind.
—
It won’t be much longer now. Rook’s hourglass was running empty.
A kinder man, a more merciful one, would do it himself. He was neither. Solas flexes his fingers, clenches a fist till the leather groans. Cold and aching hollowness still chase his memories. Once, mercy would have been simple.
But I will never offend you with pity . Solas swears. That, I can do.
—
They spot another precession of black chariots. Pillars of smoke rise from the chimneys like claws of a giant corpse, scraping lines of ash into the Fade itself. Rook is hardly more than a whisper against the purpling horizon. A weeping gash along their left temple he remembers from Minrathous has reopened. A gift from Elgar'nan's blade, a thumbnail length shy of carving into the soft tissue of their brain.
“Do you see those flowers, how they gather in one place?” Solas hears himself speak, unsure what compels him. “Once these fields bore kings and queens, conducted battles and business, a kingdom with a castle that pierced the sky.”
Rook has turned to him with a muffled curiosity. Interest piqued.
“Despite all the heroes, the villains, the grand politicking and pomp, can you guess what remains?” Solas asks. He nods to the field, heaping yellow hills stack like thick slices of butter; a lake of blue flowers congregating at its center.
“A gardener loved a chevalier. The rush when she removed her helmet, hair pouring free like gold from a pitcher. Two robin eggs for eyes, clear and true. She grew buds to match her love’s feathers. For a while they were happy.”
Wisps buoy around the unreality around them. A private part of himself admits, it is gratifying to share this.
“Then came the Blight. The gardener was uprooted, her chevalier called to duty and peril. Over despair she planted seeds, a path for her lover's victory march. Flowers as blue as a robin’s egg.”
Rook tilts their head, inky curls tumbling over the column of a bronze throat. Wind ruffles the bell-shaped flowers, a spill of lyrium over the hills.
“An act of love can outlast empires.” He has seen it time and time again.
They stand in silent vigil over the rolling Fade. Islands of earth hang across the heavens. If one holds their breath and listens, the steel of battle could be heard from a millennia away. An old place, a rare one. Solas hadn’t stood in these fields for hundreds of years. Wild magic fizzles the air.
In fits and starts their shoulders begin to shudder, spine jamming into a straight line with the strain of choking down coughs. Solas does them the courtesy of averting his gaze. Ah, I dropped my guard. He thinks distantly. Fool. By the time it ends, smoke has disappeared from the sky. Neither moves for a long while.
Red paints half of Rook’s side now, the gash into their hairline still weeping. They look exactly as they had six years ago. The sight dregs up old feelings, tangles of relief and resentment. He’ll never forget how their hand glistened, slick with crimson, fisted in Elgar’nan’s hair as they cleaved free his blighted head. The sound of their swords parting flesh, bone. A clean, high song. How his own blood roared like a hurricane.
They threw Elgar'nan's head at his feet. The last notes in the Elvanuris' ancient symphony: a wet thud and the sneer of a mortal elf. Resented. Reviled. Nothing more than trash.
“For all the abundant faults of this world, Rook…” Solas starts softly, deliberately. “Never will I deny its incredible capacity for hope.”
Rook’s lips bend soundlessly, each letter unwrapping like wax paper over sweets:
Thank you.
The next day, Rook was gone.
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