- LAVILSA -

Lavellan was thrust into a conflict during the ending of the world and tasked with a responsibility never meant for her hands, but she nevertheless assumes it because it’s the right thing to do, because there’s nothing else she can do. And this ultimately draws the eye of a man who sees for the first time in ages beyond counting that hope, wisdom, strength, life is an inane part of this terrifying world living incarnate within this creature they call the Inquisitor, that the devotion and compassion and beauty strung so easily along her fingertips is as tangible as the love blooming within him despite fearing the consequences of what that means. 

And Solas provides stability, guidance, normalcy within ab-normalcy for Lavellan while Thedas burns around her. There’s a soft beauty in his stories, in the way his gentle voice calms her in moments she fears she’ll break beneath the pressure. He’s everything and nothing she’d ever expected of a man, even if she doesn’t quite understand why.

But Lavellan doesn’t know there’s an inevitability to this profound love of theirs for years. 

As she builds an empire the likes of a legend, she turns to the man beside her—an emotional pillar of strength as whispers in the street echo “rabbit”, “knife-ear”, “Herald”—and smiles because maybe, maybe there’s a future in this mess where the stillness of their quiet mornings together can provide enough hope the sun will rise for a little while longer.

Lavellan shook Thedas to its roots. She’d become and emblem to many that compassion and hope exists in the smallest of places to the point she’d lost her identity to the masses. She’d become more than what she was, but she also had everything at her disposal. An army. A lover. A family. A devout belief. A goal. It was possible to believe she could sunder Corypheus and cut Thedas to its core by sheer will alone.

But then the Inquisition went to the Arbor Wilds, and Lavellan’s whole world changed. 

Ancient Elves are up and about, yet they don’t see the modern people as their own, nor worth their time. The stories and prophecies and knowledge carried for generations—history barely preserve with tooth and nail and blood by centuries of a dying people—were not all true, were possibly fabricated, were maybe even lies. Mythal walks among Thedas, yet hasn’t been around to help her own desperate disciples. The vallaslin is but a symbol misconstrued across time that’s been twisted in form of irony. And Lavellan’s own lover—the one person in all of Thedas she should not have trusted to a fault—locks her in the cold before she can make a sense of it all, before she even has time to process and understand what to make of herself, of her culture, of her purpose. 

(Bonus points to a Lavellan who ends up losing her clan, especially in this particular section of the story. Then you’ve really got a Lavellan who’s tossed into the wayside.)

Then Corypheus has the audacity to show his face again, forcing her to confront a mirror image of the hole in the sky that started her on this path in the first place.

And here’s where the kicker comes in:

Lavellan’s. Lost. Everything. 

And she’s done. 

Broken, exhausted, shattered beyond repair, years worth of political gambles and unimaginable responsibilities and close calls of gleaming knives in the dark ready to strike at her throat, Lavellan stares down the devil with nothing but a scar on her hand and a fucking fury in her soul. 

Broken because she doesn’t understand what caused her vhenan to leave when she needed him most, or when it was she took the step that ripped them apart despite knowing the blame isn’t hers to take. Exhausted because how many times has she cried in corners of Skyhold for no one to see from the burden and the anxieties and fears the Anchor and all that came with it left her with? Shattered because how many times has this deadly, monstrous thing that would tear apart the universe made her discover all her people lost when the worst possible fate has been lived through already? 

“You cannot kill a God.”

“I don’t believe in Gods.” Not anymore. How can she, when everything she’s come to know has been stripped of all meaning and truth before she’d ever known it had already died in the first place? 

But no answer to take its place will ever be enough. This isn’t just a matter of being in the wrong place in the wrong time, either. Corypheus slaughtered the many in name of the few, forced her hand in succumbing to a role she’d never been equipped to handle, and flung her into a path of sorrow so vast the stars themselves weep in her wake. This is fucking personal. And goddamn does Lavellan make every effort to make Corypheus’ final moments as anguishing as the ones he’d condemned her to in unison, finding sick satisfaction in ripping him apart until she’s drenched in his lyrium-coated blood.

But instead of being able to celebrate that moment’s victory after battle? Instead of being given that promised answer to cling to among the chaos despite being numbed by the odds of the impossible? Lavellan’s lover disappears, and she’s left with nothing but a slowly dying household as her Inner Circle steps into the future more easily than she can. 

Lavellan is left alone to deal with the broken pieces of an invisible aftermath, the kind that leaves her shaking under sweaty sheets in the middle of the night as the devil’s fingers choke the life from her lungs in dreams, or the kind where she swears she’ll turn to hear her lover’s sweet nothings in her ear and not re-live the moment he threw her away with eyes that once promised the world.

Friends leave for new adventures and responsibilities, their resolve for a better future a noble endeavor she supports, but a tired, lonely, selfish part of her feels envious because it means Skyhold is no longer an emotional fortress as much as it is a physical one. 

It’s the greatest, most tragically beautiful example of the great rise before the fall. And the best part of it all?

Lavellan keeps going. 

She keeps going as she closes rifts, expands her reach to help the people after the wound Corypheus raked across Thedas, and does her best to maintain all ties within her Inner Circle to keep what little sense she can make of the turmoil within her.

She keeps going as she travels through eluvian after eluvian and inches closer to a devastating truth deep down she already knows yet can’t face, grinds through the trembling of her arm despite the waves of enemies she doesn’t know to put a face to, and lives to tell the tragedy of a lost elf’s tale that remains to be her greatest test of all. 

Lavellan keeps going, and the world be damned if she won’t live to see this through.