One thing I love about Solas is that he is, in fact, a terrible liar. He's excellent at telling the truth (with the very important caveat of the truth as he sees it) in a remarkably misleading manner.
However, telling the truth and being honest are not the same thing. He is being deceptive, though I would argue not lying. I also tend to split the hairs very finely here and would call him being deceptive rather than lying. I don't really even think they are lies of omission, but I tend to think that people are not entitled to know a great deal of information about anything, and thus tend to feel lies of omission are a bit nonsense. Ask better questions. My Lavellan was also her clan's spy, so she tends to have a flexible approach to the subject, and thus is more unbothered about it than Solas, who I do think is fundamentally honest, but constrained by circumstance to be deceptive by duty.
He did nothing. Technically true, for a very limited definition of true. He allowed Corypheus to locate his orb, Corypheus did it (also, it was a good plan, no one else was doing anything about it, and no one was going to pay attention to one lone elven apostate).
He saw it in the Fade. Technically the Fade was everywhere, before the Veil, and then he lay in dark and dreaming sleep while countless wars and ages passed.
Mythal was the best of them (true. a bit damned by faint praise, though.)
The one time where he actually lies, it's super easy to clock, because he trips all over himself. I have distracted you from your duty. It shall never happen again. (projecting much? he does this with Rook, too, when he drops them into Fade Jail. I don't even think he was talking to Rook so much as himself. He was totally starting to lose it at this point, I think.)
He kinda doesn't even lie after Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts (though he does get really flustered because that question was entirely unexpected and he didn't have an opportunity to come up with a glib answer and he is Not Happy about that). "Oh. Well, never… directly, of course. An elven apostate is rarely invited to speak with empresses and kings." And then I saw it in the Fade. (True. Also true if you limit the response to the Orlesian court. Probably less true if you extend that to include Arlathan, although he could hardly have been called an elven apostate then, so still true. But answering for simply Orlais is completely valid.)
Or he evades the question entirely. With the orb. What is it, and how do you know about it? He never answers that question. He answers the first half (accurately, if not fully), and just ignores the second half.
And Veilguard. This is not an invitation to bash Veilguard, to be perfectly clear, because I adored the careful threading and very precise use of wording that they did throughout here. It was so terribly Solas, in my opinion, and I was giggling every time he did his thing.
"I abhor the use of blood magic." Correct. Rook is specifically referring to "blood magic" in the modern Thedosian sense of doing some messed up mind control stuff. The context of the conversation matters here. Solas even says, would have if I could have. Also true. It is not until after this, that Solas realizes what Rook is thinking about Varric. Varric is... very practiced at shading the truth himself. Totally changed what he was going to say there and came up with that particular little plan on the fly.
This is also, by the way, consistent to how he acts in Inquisition. When he's talking with the Herald about blood magic, as a theoretical source of power, it's simply a thing that can be done. There is, after all, consensual blood magic, or blood magic powered by the self. (And I suspect he used some of the residual toxic waste of blood magic residue in Arlathan to power the ritual, but I digress) But when he speaks with Cole about blood magic, he's indignant. Of course he would not bind Cole! To take away someone's agency would be wrong!
He does do some really shady nonsense about telling Rook to tell Varric he is sorry. The whole manipulating Rook's mind to prevent them from realizing about Varric was the sketchiest. Also something I could definitely see him doing, in this particular very dire set of straits. He can be ruthless, expedient, but he is not cruel, and he is being both ruthless and expedient with Rook here.
The bit that really got me was the "IF joining me and stopping Elgar'nan requires the Veil to stay in place, then I will pay that price unflinching" (in which the if is doing some very heavy lifting and "I swear to you the Veil will not come down by my hand." That was some fairytale monkey's paw wish wording if I ever heard it, and that ring of absolute sincerity that just was like, oh, you are telling the truth so hard, you're up to something. I couldn't even be annoyed at him for it because it was so incredibly obvious, but also everyone was very much backed into a corner there. (I was utterly delighted by it. I suspect my Lavellan was also delighted by it. They did tell Rook, after all.)
His face doesn't even lie well. It has this hard, closed off, brittle quality when he's trying to be deceptive and he's being Fen'harel. He's got a very open face when he's just being Solas. And you can see it shift, in the memories, from something more vulnerable to something harder.
I truly adore Solas' very precise, rules lawyering approach to speech, in which he is fundamentally truthful without being honest, and lets people come to the entirely wrong conclusions. It's delightful. It's a very useful skill. I love that he feels bad about it. My Lavellan wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Solas is a better person than she is and she knows it.
I do think that Clan Lavellan was spot on with 'God of Misfortune', as the most accurate description of Solas, and I liked 'God of Lies', because it's so obviously propaganda that survived, and like... consider the source of that information. Perhaps maybe one shouldn't believe the Evanuris about much at all, which I also really enjoyed about Veilguard, which in my opinion continued the general Dragon Age theme of checking one's sources and the biases and reliability thereof and not trusting the folks in power blindly.
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