he would walk without fear.

also, apologies for being less-than active, but im halfway through applying to graduate school & have sent off the two Big ‘Uns, cambridge and oxford, and so hopefully my writing energy shall return soon enough. sending so much love & light to you all. ❤️

ursula k. le guin. | accepting. | @ofrevas.

“A wise line of thought, Inquisitor.”

He looks up from the sketch he is working on, hands stained with black charcoal. The travel lamp beside him casts enough light for him to see, but not enough light to drown out the stars above him. He is tracing contours of constellations in light strokes, marking the places where the astrariums they have solved lie, where their triangulation might lead. 

Stars in the thousands, above them. Stars that tell stories, that sing, that whisper. He never saw stars like this, before: before they were one with the magic, shifting, changing, breathing like bright creatures of dust. Alive.

Now they twinkle, instead of gallop. Blink past the tears of time, spilled across the space they traverse each night. So many stars are tinged green, now, the Breach bleeding time, space, and anything that might lie in their cracks. 

ursula k. le guin. | accepting. | @mercysought.

Your gods reeked of despair. He wants to say it. Speak it. Shape it in the words and air. Make it flesh, real, tangible. Your gods drank it. Fed upon it like starving men at the ends of the earth. Like magic only deeper, now, in this world gone quiet with mercy. Words like power. He used to breathe, and worlds would blossom before him.

He’s taken that from the bones of the earth like a hawk, like a vulture, and every step he takes is a reminder. A breath and then a breath and then a breath, and in answer only silence. That is what scares him and scars him, the silence. He will never grow used to it. Under all the beauty he has found despite it, he will never grow used to the silence. 

He watches her with heavy, lidded eyes. Watches her past the smoke and the dark all around them. He is part of the shadows, in this room of council. Whether he is in love with them or not, pledged to them or no, he is here, lingering between light and bright death, obsidian sharpness of a blade he has fashioned himself, with his own actions and his own words. A blade turned always to his neck, always ready to carve, blade black with his red blood. Pooling. Ready. Pooling in his dreams the way it has begun to do and will never cease. A butcher of his own making, he the lamb, he the world, the world the lamb for slaughtering.  

In front of him, in her terrible exactness, her claws and her scars under the armour. Those eyes he hates, that relentlessness he knows he sees in himself. Every morning. That pride, names are as names do, always, marked, his mother gifted him with this, on his own heart. Names are as names do, there is little that can be done with them if not bear them like a yoke.

They both know well enough what that weight means.

“I think you mean Dread. You will not take the council of Dread, no. You are too stubborn to listen, like a child who only believes that her mother and her mother alone is right, and no one else understands. Who’d rather break the toy than ask for help.”

   “A traveler?…” her head tilts to the side, brows furrowing. It had been a very long time since she had heard about visitors, still, Mamae would usually not leave visitors alone or without anyone accompanying them around the temple. There were quite a few people there and Manala wondered if  that wasn’t because her mother worried that they would get lost, feel overwhelmed even. There were certain parts of the temple that were scary, especially in the dark “Are you here to meet with mamae, then?“ 

A smile lights up in her face as butterflies, shinning almost by themselves, fly from his staff and around her. Her hands open and move slowly towards them, not to scare the beautiful animals away.

   “Ooh, they are beautiful!” she places her palm beneath one of the insects flying around, hoping that they would land on the back of her hand. They looked like fireflies, but bigger. Brown eyes lift towards him with a larger smile “How can I do that?“ 

Her hands turn, brown eyes following the butterflies once again “My name is Manala, like the ocean! What is yours?” 

It is not hard to understand whose daughter she is. Perhaps he should have known. The surprise is a momentary sting: a brief thought that blooms in his chest. After that, Manala is Manala, regardless of whose blood or legacy she shares. The hate for a parent does not echo on the shoulders of a child, if one is kind and careful. Manala is an innocent: whatever war he will fight against the Priestess, it can wait, it can happen beyond her eyes and ears, and despite this she will die, like the rest of the world will die, like the Fade when it will break, and he has the gall to think all this, both strains of thought, the crack of bitter light. He swallows the bile, the bitter, the blood. He swallows the light of his tenderness, he must do so every day. 

“Solas.” he says, when she asks him for his name, with a softness he didn’t know still lived in him. It catches in his throat, makes him unaware, the words a noose that suddenly tugs. A name that used to be simple, something carved in the past and the present. On his hands, he bears traces of that name, it’s in his heart.

Fen’Harel a mask nailed to him. Some nights he wants to tear it off. Some nights the road is steep and the soles of his feet are ripped, drip blood. Barefoot, clawing his way towards a light he knows is necessary. Dinan’shiral. Like a mantra. Dead leaves where his dreams should have been.

The spirit is drawn by the scratching of quill against parchment.   A sound that stands out,  not the wind through leaf and grass,  not the buzz of insects;  a sound that piques interest,  entices with the lure of a mystery.   It’s not possible to tell what’s on that parchment from the sound alone.   It has to be seen,  maybe read.   The sound is just a promise of something.   Thoughts given physical shape of ink and runes.   A question,  or an answer to a question.

The spirit takes a fleeting shape of long limbs and litheness.   It peers over the elf’s shoulder,  head of shifting green-brown hair cocked to the side.

“ What are you write—  oh,  you’re drawing. “

They come to him, like water to the sea. In nature, alongside the edges of his vision. In his dreams, dipped with his eyes wide open. This world that always gives, these words shaped like eternity: magic before magic was a word. Magic when magic was just breathing.

The soft chimes of the spirit as it reaches, touches, feels. Reality flowing from one body to another, a world that shifts just barely, just slightly, enough to make the hairs on his arms stand on end.