Oh, Solas Mio

And finally I found the answer I was looking for right there in the title (how I didn't notice this till now). The letter is filed under Notes from the Inquisition.

It completely shifts how I read the letter.

“I do not know if you will see these words” isn’t hesitation about writing or sending it. Solas did send it. What he doesn’t know is whether it will reach her.

“My ritual is ready and will soon be set in motion.” Lavellan received it before the ritual. That’s how she knows and implies as much when Rook and the Inquisitor meet the first time. The player only gets this letter after that first meeting, when she hands over the wolf statuette. The wolf statuette that the Inquistor never directly admits where and how they got it, only when.

So what actually happened here?

Did Solas hide the letter inside the statuette because he couldn’t bring himself to deliver it and so sealed it away in an object symbolising regret - an object only Lavellan would recieve that is the key to Solas' memories? And when Lavellan touched it, that’s when the letter surfaced?

Or did Lavellan already have the letter, and chose to pass it along with the statuette? A deliberate move - to show a version of Solas to Rook they wouldn't see.

As mentioned, the theory of Rook being the one to send this to Lavellan never really made sense to me because it would mean that Rook had to have been the one to send all the Inquisitor love letters to them. And if Rook can somehow magically access Inquisition records from a distance, why only the letters?

If other Inquisitors received letters directly from their lover, it follows that Lavellan did too.

'Notes from the Inquisition' now reads more to me like the Inquisitor is the one allowing these letters to be seen and choosing what Rook gets access to. For whatever the reason one chooses.

I didn’t know this!! And my headcanon is that Rook is Solavellan’s (found) daughter!!!

Just focus on the good part;

Him grabbing her ass and grabbing a full mitt full.

Forever the Ass Man, even when he's trying to distance himself.

We know that Solas woke 'weak from his slumber' and could not come up with an immediate way to recover his power, hence the Corypheus plan.

Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain also wake weak from their slumber/imprisonment; but they do immediately recover their power, using a blood magic ritual in D'Meta's Crossing and destroying the village. This is interesting to me because it stands to reason that Solas, having similar origins, could probably have recovered his power in a similar way. But strikingly, he does not.

This is an interesting reminder I think: if Solas were as ruthless as he's pretending (trying!) to be, there are almost certainly ways he could have recovered his power much more quickly and thus opened the orb without using Corypheus. Although the Corypheus plan was clearly not a good idea, it was nonetheless an attempt to find a compromise which would get the orb open without resorting to blood sacrifices of innocents etc. Despite Solas' claim that he originally saw the modern people of Thedas as 'like Tranquils' it's clear that even then he wasn't able to bring himself to treat them as disposable in the way that Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain immediately did. 

(Of course, in the end the Corypheus plan resulted in a lot of deaths anyway due to the Conclave explosion, but Solas presumably didn't know that Corypheus would open the orb in a location with so many people around - there's a tragic irony here that if he had just done some kind of blood magic ritual it might very well have cost fewer lives.)

This is an interesting throughline in his character - because there's no doubt that Solas is willing to take extreme measures in pursuit of his cause, but he consistently fails at being truly ruthless. He really should have killed the Inquisitor at the end of Trespasser, or at least not divulged so much to them. He really should have killed Varric as soon as he appeared at the ritual in Veilguard, rather than risking Varric disrupting something so important. He could have used blood magic in a much more coercive way on Rook and then he probably could have got out of the prison faster. He could have been much more manipulative in the Inquisition and turned some of the Inquisition's resources to serve his cause. Interestingly, the only instances where he really seems 'ruthless' to me are when he kills his old friends, but since both of them have betrayed him you have to suspect that he's not actually being ruthless here but rather acting out of hurt.

I am so normal about these two....

Thinking about how as he was writing it, he was imagining her in the world he's about to restore - alive, present, walking in that future.

Thinking about how he isn't expecting forgiveness, but that he still wants to be seen by her, hoping she'll understand even if she never chooses to forgive.

But mostly I'm thinking about that final line of the letter.

That it's not just a reflection of what he still feels for her in the moment of writing. But a reflection of another truth he wants her to know.

“What I feel for you will never change”, holds a future message.

How it's Solas drawing Lavellan to him, his magic and power on full display, eyes glowing, ablaze in magic. How he's kissing Lavellan in wholeness, no more secrets - taking Lavellan's mouth with his as Fen'Harel - as the Dread Wolf.