OPEN POST.

[uth]

ill make it look nice later ugh.

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[uth]

This isn't the first time he's caught an Inquisition spy in his organization. He's noticed a few himself-- not being one to lead from a distance, just as L- just as the Inquisitor herself had been-- and his agents have caught their fair share. No, what makes this agent unique is the ease with which they were caught. Solas suspects they intended to have this one caught, which means it's some sort of trap. From the report, the agent is an elven woman, Dalish by the sound of the description (tattoos of Dirthamen. Solas wonders if this is some sort of intentional mind-game before he dismisses the idea).

If it's a trap, Solas would prefer to be the one 'caught'. He doubts the salvo will be successful, but it will fail especially if he's the one to see it through. The agents in his organization are well picked, but they don't have his experience.

He instructs the woman-- unconscious, carried bound in a burlap sack-- to be placed in a nearby ruin. "She may be dangerous," he tells his agents, "I will handle her." They understand it's probably a trap as well. They appreciate him putting himself at risk. It's a dance he's done a thousand times before, though they don't know it. He knows how to play the role of the long-suffering leader. Once, he thinks, he truly was one, when he wasn't stringing them along into their own demise.

He doesn't let himself think about that for too long.

His agents leave the area, ruins on the outskirts of an Orlesian forest. Solas can feel the magic of the place buzzing in his ears. It doesn't distract him like it once was. He wonders when he stopped feeling the wrongness of this world. He knows it's here, intellectually, but it no longer feels the pain of it so viscerally. All the more reason to fix this place. He can't let himself get... comfortable.

Better get to work. He unties the drawstring holding the bag closed, and waits for the body within it to awaken. He wants to interrogate her before he kills her, and find out what, exactly, they thought was so clever about letting one of the Inquisitor's agents die so uselessly.

[dirthena]

It was a fool's gamble. Lavellan knew that before she proposed it -- there was nothing to guarantee her safety, no chance of a grand rescue by the remnants of the Inquisition, and many ways for it to go wrong. Someone could kill her, the obvious plant, and she'd never get close enough to Solas to make it worth it. But she'd grown sick of dreams haunted by his presence and yet always gone when she turned, of the heavy weight of fear that she might fail in her quest to change his mind. Saving Thedas requires saving Solas, pulling him back from an end that will no doubt destroy him. Her heart will not let her entertain what her mind knows to be true -- that saving Thedas may require her to kill him if she cannot.

So she does what he should expect by now: the unexpected, and joins his ranks. Lavellan means to be discovered, means to be dragged before Solas so that he can deal with her himself. Risky and foolish and more likely to fail than to succeed, but what choice does she have?

I think I would have preferred a knife, Lavellan thinks, in the moment between consciousness and unconsciousness, blackness swimming over her vision before she falls. The surprise doesn't fade when she begins to come to, half expecting in that last wavering moment to have met a rather unfortunate and, honestly, underwhelming end.

Batting away the burlap from her face, Lavellan groans as she struggles to sit, head still swimming. "You really know how to show someone a good time," Lavellan mutters, trying to squint against the dappled light, made too bright by being throw into a sack and that little matter of being unconscious. At least she's not dead -- even as the figure in front of her blocking out the light wavers and solidifies into a shadow that is hauntingly, achingly familiar.

Well, it's nice to know her plan worked.

[uth]

He knows what happened the moment she opens her mouth. The moment he hears her voice. He always loved her voice. He always loved the fact that she always could surprise him. Even when he thought he knew her, even when he thought she had finished unfolding new ideas, new plans, new promise, she-

Solas takes a step back, and has barely enough time to keep himself from faltering before she crawls out of the bag. Damn. Damn. They said she was crippled, which he assumed was a ploy meant to remind him of the Inquisitor. They didn't say she was missing the arm. He didn't think they'd ever just send her.

He can't hide his expression. It settles into the same one as before, tired and pained.

Vhenan, he wants to say, but he's not that cruel. Not yet. "I should have expected this," he says ruefully. Even to his ears, he sounds woeful. Woeful one. Abelavhen had been the word for it. No, he's felavhen. A fool for acting so slowly.

He brings the barrier up at once. He shouldn't have given her nearly so much time to prepare herself. Two arms or just one, she has magic in her blood still. The spell is purely defensive, though. He wants to put distance between them. He can't bring himself to harm her directly.

Not yet.

The irony doesn't escape him, that the wall he places between them is one of ice.

[dirthena]

They took her staff and her blade hilt, but Lavellan has never truly been unarmed. Disarmed, perhaps, and more often than not by him. The joke falls flat even unsaid; she would rather save her breath as quickly as she loses it around him, when a look threatens to bring her low. Whatever satisfaction she could glean from knowing he is not without some lingering feeling is inconsequential in the face of the truth -- that he is not the only one, and as sure as her presence brings him pain, so does his.

Words come to her lips the moment the wall springs up -- he won't even look at her, if he was going to kill her Lavellan would hope he would have the decency to look at her while he did so -- but a second attack never comes. A chance -- hopeless and desperate -- but Lavellan has always been about causes like that. Why should Solas be any different?

Fire has never been her preferred element, but it jumps to her hand easily, warm and familiar as she casts it out towards the base of the wall. Not an attack, a counter. If she has to break every barrier he puts between them to get through his self-loathing, his grief, and drag him back from the path he's set upon, she will. By magic or with her bare hand -- she must.

"At least face me here, Solas," she calls, letting her voice ring out amongst the ruins. "If you can't bring yourself to do it in the Fade, at least do it here." He slips from her grasp in dreams, but Lavellan won't let him go without a fight. Not this time. He has to obey the rules of the world he created, has to live here like the rest of them, see that the wound he made has healed, and learn to live with the scar.

They've left enough wounds on each other for her to know she's not asking for the impossible.

[uth]

That stings more than she can mean it to. He's drawn in easily to her dreams, because distance is nothing in the Fade. He feels the familiar comfort of her dreaming mind, and suddenly he's there, and for a moment he can forget. Those moments are unspeakably precious to him, and the slip through his fingers like sand. The second she notices him-- and she always does-- he slips away with ease.

Things are easier in the Fade. Maybe too easy.

He should run, and he's ready to-- the ice springs up around him, preparing him to step away, but she melts his wall and freezes his steps. Another despicable bit of symbolism. He stares at her through the dripping ice.

"You came here to talk." He sounds skeptical. She can't be this much of a romantic. (Can she be? He should stop attempting to predict her.)

[dirthena]

Love and desperation do strange things when mixed, and Lavellan has never done anything halfway. Logic cast aside in the hope that she can make him see reason. Anything to stop the ache in her chest, to ignore the voice that reminds her what she must do if she cannot succeed in this. She is the once-Inquisitor, and while the title means nothing now that it has been disbanded, Lavellan finds she can't simply set aside her duty. Thedas needs her, with no regards to her own opinion on the matter, and Lavellan answers when no one else will.

She has always been a fan of hopeless causes.

"To talk sense, since you've seemed to have lost all capacity for it." Lavellan says, any anger has leaked out of her tone, replaced by a determination that saw her through the past three years. Said through the melting ice that separates them. Funny, how he still manages to keep her at arm's length, even when she wants nothing more than to reach for him. If he would have trusted her--

But it's no use dwelling on what has passed, unless she wishes to forget the reality of the world around her. Only one of them here believes they have that luxury, after all.

[uth]

"You think my dedication to this is so shallow?" He says with a hollow laugh. He's tired, so tired, of all of this. He doubts she's underestimating him. She's too clever for that by far. But all can be swayed by silly, romantic hopes.

He almost was, once.

"What is your argument? That it is wrong?" He tilts his head to the side, staring at her with an attempt at a detached expression. It's imperfect, but for now, it will do.

[dirthena]

"No." And her own voice is flat and empty; she is as hollow as his laugh. How could she think that, when he so clearly would sacrifice everything for it? That he wished she could prove him wrong but would not give himself over to it, would not let her? If there is one thing he believes in, it must be that this needs doing at the cost of everything else. Of him, too, Lavellan feels. "I wouldn't accuse you of shallowness." Of pride, of selfishness, of being a liar and a betrayer -- all of those could come to her lips easily and she would feel satisfaction by using them against him. But they would wound her, too, in their own way.

Sorrow mixed with an aching hope seeps into her expression along with the steel of determination in her eyes. She has always been terrible at hiding her emotions, and as he clears his face she refuses to do the same to her's. Let him see, let him know.

Is it wrong to want the familiar back? To fix a mistake instead of seeing the truth of the scar and the healing that happened after? Lavellan steps forward, lets the ice crack under her feet and against her as she moves, falling away and down. She will not let herself be swayed by his attempts to keep her out, not now. It's not something she, they, Thedas can afford. It is, but how to make him see it? Simply telling him that does nothing, will change nothing. "Do you remember Redcliffe, Solas? What Alexius did to Dorian and I?"

It is an imperfect way to prove her point, but if she could be wrong even once, perhaps it will be enough to make him reconsider. A desperate, fleeting grasp at an opportunity she will never have again. You're real, and it means everyone could be real. It changes everything, but it can't. She will hold onto Cole's words, as she had before -- then tossing and turning, wondering. Now she knows, know she has what was unsaid; tangled with her own words from before where nothing was real because she was going to fix it, make it so it never happened.

[uth]

Ah, Redcliffe. The ash and the smoke, the terror, the knowledge that time had broken around them like songbird's bones. The way the magic tasted, acrid under his fingernails, and the haunting knowledge that it was all his fault. And that this Dalish woman, this relic of a dead age, fixing all his ruined mistakes. She had inspired him to move forward, in her way. She had inspired him to plunge ahead, failures be damned.

So his voice is harsh, bitter, when he speaks. "Yes," he says, "I recall you risked your life to undo the mistakes leading to that moment. All the lives that begun in that year were snuffed out to fix that mistake. All the death and sacrifice, erased."

He gives her a pointed look, sharpened by years of bitter loneliness in her absence.

[dirthena]

"Is that the only thing you took away from Redcliffe?" She doesn't mean to sound incredulous, but she can't help herself. It had been too easy to look at the world she'd ended up in and discount it because it didn't matter. None of it had mattered, and it should have.

Perhaps she should have been clearer. Emboldened, she takes another step forward -- closer to him. Lavellan doesn't have any real illusions about her ability to hold him in place if he wished to leave, but she must try.

"I told Leliana that none of it was real, before she sacrificed herself for us." It hadn't been, to her. She'd simply vanished and reappeared in a place where everything had gone to the demons, to red lyrium. It was so easy to discount it as nothing because she could fix it with a wave of her hand. "But it was, Solas. Just because I could fix it doesn't mean it didn't happen. That whatever she, you," he had been there, red eyes and it had made her insides twist at the time -- still does, in spite of everything, "had lived through -- it was real."

They are real. And he would doom them all because he thought otherwise.

[uth]

Solas sees what she means, and he admires her for it. Her steadfast devotion to striving for ideals-- while preparing for, and often having to deal with, the worst-- had lead the Inquisition in its strength, and steered it in its worst days. She was truly an example to them, even to Solas, at times.

But he doesn't think she understands the full meaning of her words. "You mean to tell me," he says, voice cool, "that you should not have undone it? You should have stayed in that hellscape, slowly rotting inside out from red lyrium's poison?"

[dirthena]

Ah. Her determination wavers then, doubt flicking across her face for a second before she steels herself anew. A foolish tactic, but Lavellan won't let this chance slip away from her -- she cannot afford it, even as she kicks herself all the same for it. Focus, focus.

But Lavellan can give him honesty. "I don't know," she admits, taking another step forward, letting the ice crack underneath her bare feet. "But I do know I should have considered it, instead of blindly assuming that if I fixed it, it'd be as if it never happened." A further thought occurs to her, although it seems more desperate, more reaching than the last. Which, Lavellan will admit, was a significant one already.

"And what of this one, Solas? If that thought should be asked of a doomed world, what about Thedas now? I see no hellscape, just a world scarred but healing." And if something is destroying her from the inside out in it, it's not red lyrium.

[uth]

Solas' expression softens into one of pity. It's an incremental change, barely noticeable except to those who know him best. Except to her.

He turns away, staring at the crumbling ruins that surround them, and the swaying forest beyond. "In Arlathan," he says, "there was a story. It was famous, a parable from one of our greatest philosophers." He dips his head slightly. "You've never heard it." No one has in over four thousand years.

"It's a supposition. Suppose you entered a cave, and found within a man who had only ever lived within its depths. He had never seen the sun. He had crawled about in darkness all his life, only seeing the shadows his cookfire cast on the walls. In his cave, he is perfectly content, for he has never known anything else."

[dirthena]

Lavellan doesn't need his pity, and her own eyes narrow slightly in response. The Dalish have tried in the face of great adversity, of which he slept through instead of helping them. He has no right to pity her for something he willfully doesn't understand.

And when did she start thinking of herself as separate? No, she is Dalish, no matter what truths she knows. It is the one thing he cannot completely take from her. It has to be.

"Does the story say anything about creatures capable of independent thought who found their way into the cave to join him?" It is, in her defense, a question she feels is worth asking. She takes the story to heart, if not in the way he means it -- it is something from Arlathan, from her history, and its historical value is immeasurable. Not that she will ever be able to pass it onto her clan.

She comes to rest behind him, not quite within arm's reach. "Then that's his reality, and it would be cruel to force him to experience a world he doesn't know and doesn't understand, one that will drive him -- and his newfound companions -- mad."

[uth]

"So you would subject him to living in ignorance, subsisting on scraps, for all his days?" Solas' voice is unexpectedly harsh, and he doesn't truly mean the anger he implies in his tone. Not at her. Not any more.

"It's an allegory, V- Lethallin." His voice is softer, now. Kinder. Gentler. As though he is himself speaking to that wretched creature lost in darkness. "There are many answers to the question. Some suppose... the shadows another living creature casts on the wall are so grand and unlike anything he's seen, he's no choice but- but to worship them."

His voice catches on the last breath. It's the slightest thing in the world. He knows she'll catch it.

[dirthena]

"It's not a bad life, if one is happy." Lavellan is ready to argue further, to take offense to ignorance as if Solas is the only one who is capable of judging what is and isn't real to all of Thedas -- he isn't a god, as he's made clear, he has no right. Even the softening of his voice seems hollow and empty, as if she's too blinded to see the truth. But then he trips twice. The first is nearly a wound to her heart with the unsaid syllables of vhenan, and the second is telling.

Her own voice loses its edge, resembles something close to the fondness she'd used with him before. Foolish. "Then the ancient elves of Arlathan and the Dalish are not so different. Why doom one reality in exchange for another, similarly blinded?" It seems like a logical question. They'd been called gods back then too, or has he forgotten the rebellion he led? Mythal's death had only led him to lock the Evanuris away, not fight to undermine them in the beginning. Still -- "What does that make you, Solas? Locked away with the rest of us, watching shadows on the wall? Who casts them for you?"

She'd have him answer, if he can. It will probably not be as revealing as she hopes, but she has to try.

uppaland.

[uth]

He is here, in this place, where all his plans have gone asunder. Things could be better. They could also be much, much worse, but Solas has never been one to dwell on the positive.

A thousand unknown worlds, heard previously in the barest whispers of the Fade, now unlocked and spewing forth violence and chaos. As a designated trickster, he ought to be taking more joy in it. The Dalish must be imagining the dread wolf dancing and howling on graves. Solas, standing before the helicoid expanse of an ancient tower, only feels very tired.

A thousand unknown worlds. There are metaphysical implications to this. Solas had meant to pierce the Veil. Instead, something far deeper was breached. Are worlds-- this one, the true measure of it, the Fade and the waking world-- simply bubbles crammed together? Could that be used? What about alternate timelines, accidents and mistakes? Time travel magic was popular, before.

What a hellish landscape this world is, and its cauterized denizens prance from dead to dying with no knowledge of their loss. There, a group forms a small mob around one of the Inquisitions greater oddities. A Dalish parody of an elf, found in a land where the Dalish's fevered imaginings are apparently real and true and sitting behind a desk, preening. Solas had meant to have a word with the man, study, investigate. Instead, he plays the awkward sort, used to the forest, wanting to avoid the crowded space he's butted his head into.

Or perhaps it's the truth. He's come to adore his solitude. Where the lie begins and ends grows unclear, at times. Once, Solas remembers, he was able to feel lonely.

"Ahem," he murmurs. "I'll... reschedule our chat, serah."