It’s been 84 years since I wrote anything, largely thanks to Smol Beach, but when @scharoux asked me to do a commission for the 14 Days of DA Lovers event, I couldn’t resist this delicious, angsty prompt.
Thank you as always for trusting me with Rhaella, Sacha, and everyone check out all the lovely art and writing for the event!
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Pairing: Rhaella Lavellan x Solas
Rating: G
Rhaella was over the edge of the cliff before she knew what had happened.
One moment - frost at her fingertips as she cast a glyph to freeze the Red Templar barrelling towards her - the next - nothing but iron-grey sky and her stomach hollowing out as she fell. She was too shocked to be afraid, to do anything but fall. Her right side hurt. Why did it hurt so terribly?
She shouldn’t be falling.
She needed to stop falling.
“Rhaella!”
The voice broke through. She reached out blindly, all animal instinct, caught hold of the edge of one of the basalt pillars that marked the Storm Coast, scrabbled to hold onto it. Processed finally that the ache in her side was an arrow. She must have been shot by a different templar as she cast the glyph.
She was slipping.
“Rhaella!”
The ocean roared below her. It would be easy, she thought, to let go. To fall. She knew she needed to hold on though. The Anchor crackled in her hand, pain lancing up her left arm as it did. She needed to hold on.
“Rhaella!”
There was a loud crack on the cliff above her, a concussive wave of force. A spell. The magic from it rushed through her own aura, made her flinch at its power.
She was slipping. She was slipping. She was going to fall. She was going to fall.
And then there was Solas above her, his hand outstretched.
“Rhaella, take my hand!”
She did it without hesitating. He pulled her up. It was as easy as falling had been. Trusting all her weight to him. He had her. He had her.
Even through their armored gloves she could feel the strength of his hand and his arm. She could feel how he hauled her close to him as she cleared the edge of the cliff, kicking and pulling her way along to help him. She could feel his warmth, how heavily he was breathing.
He had her.
She looked at him - at the raindrops on his cheekbones, his eyelashes - at the way his pupils were blown wide, his full lips parted like he was about to say something. Like he was about to kiss her. She melted against him, willing him to.
And then she remembered.
Crestwood.
The pale blue light that wreathed his hands as he burned her vallaslin away.
Solas stepped away from her then, as he had that night.
“The boss okay?”
Bull was hefting his axe out of the body of the archer who’d shot her. The wet crunch shocked the last of the reverie from Rhaella’s system. Her wet armor clung to her and her lungs burned from screaming or panting or both. She’d nearly fallen and died in the midst of a battle. The Anchor buzzed and flickered. How could she have been so careless? Who would have sealed the rifts and defeated Corypheus if she was gone?
And how did she lose sight of all of that as she fell, as he rescued her? How did her mind circle endlessly back to him when he'd rejected her? Harden your heart, he'd said. She started to -
“I believe so,” Solas called back to Bull.
And then his hand was on her right side, where the arrow was, and Rhaella was lost again.
“I can -” she began, though the words seemed to come from somewhere outside herself as she focused on that point of contact.
“Let me -” he said, his words tripping over hers.
Rhaella let him.
Rhaella let him examine the wound even though she already knew it was more bruising than anything else, something she could easily have tended herself, because it had been only a fortnight since Crestwood (would she ever look at that name on a map again without her heart cracking open?) and that fortnight had felt like falling, freewheeling, untethered, as she replayed the scene over and over again. Standing there, his hand on her side as he examined the wound, felt like solid ground again.
Why? She wanted to ask him, even though she knew it was pointless. He hadn’t given her an answer that night or any night since then. But the terror in his voice as he called her name - as he begged for her to take his hand -
In another world. Why not this world? If you are that afraid to lose me -
“It did not pierce your armor,” he said. “But I would imagine you are quite sore from the impact. I could ease your pain if you...”
He looked away as his words trailed off. Perhaps what she was thinking was written plainly on her face.
Yes. You could ease my pain. You could tell me why.
Harden your heart, Rhaella.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Rhaella wondered if she sounded hollow to anyone who could hear her, or if it was another aftereffect of the fall. If the wind was still rushing in her ears.
Solas moved away from her. Only an inch or so, but it was enough. Boundary lines were redrawn.
"Inquisitor," he said, soft, polite, distant as the moon.
Rhaella did not heal the wound. Not right away. The ache was a reminder to stay focused on her duty, to not be so careless next time. To fix things herself, because she was alone again. Solas had made that perfectly clear.
Except -
That night, as the camp prepared to settle in, the Inquisition soldiers buzzing around them like fireflies as they worked through their last orders of the day -
Rhaella watched as Bull asked Solas if he wanted to play a game of chess with a real board this time. She saw Solas as he hesitated to answer, his own words needing to travel a great distance before he spoke them, the way her own words did (no thank you, Bull. Not tonight). She saw from the corner of her eye how he looked at her just a moment too long - just long enough that she thought she could see cracks around his mask -
And then all she wanted to do was cross the distance between him and say take my hand and pull them both back to shore.
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Hi everyone! Things are crazy all over, and I’m confined to house (more or less) as I know a lot of you are - so let’s do some discounted commissions!
Read on for more info! Slots will open on Friday March 20th around 5pm Eastern Standard Time.
$15 $10 Drabble - 500-750 words, SFW or NSFW. This will be a more “focused” moment in time, or a stream-of-consciousness-y character/relationship study.
Examples: “Swearing” (NSFW, 300 words); “The First Time” (500 words). “Keeping Tabs” for @ladynorbert and “Begin Again” for @laskulls are also in this category.
$30 $20 Small Scene - 1500-2500 words, SFW or NSFW. Scenes in this category will be more condensed than full scenes, so they most likely won’t be plot heavy, but they will have a lot more detail than a drabble. “A Closed Loop,” which I did for @thevikingwoman, is a good example.
$55 $45 Full Scene - 4000-5000 words, SFW or NSFW. This will be a more full scene with a beginning-middle-end arc.
Examples: “Never Alone,” an NSFW fic trade for @hansaera that is 5000 words. “The Turning of the Year” for @scharoux is another good example that is SFW! Most of my other one-shots and prompt fills also fall into this range. You can check them out on my Solavellan or Marian x Merrill masterposts.
$250 Long Fic - Slots for this kind of commission are currently closed. up to 25,000 words, SFW or NSFW. Exactly what it sounds like - a multichapter long fic that essentially gives you a discount off ordering multiple full scenes! This is the only type of commission that I will accept partial payment for - we will work together to figure out how much you will pay and when. I did this for @scharoux with “The Last Game” and “Lost Horizon,” both of which have 4 parts.
I will write:
- For the Dragon Age fandom. I have played all 3 games several times and while there are some characters I have not written much, I am willing to talk about any of them. I am most experienced with Inquisition characters.
- Smut! Please see below for what kinks I am not comfortable with.
- Underage (especially nothing with any pedophilic tones, and nothing where one character is an adult and another is not), incest, and noncon. This includes rape fantasies, even if they are consensual.
- I’m comfortable with some Dom/Sub dynamics, but full on master/slave dynamics are not quite my thing. I also don’t know how well I’d do with a full on humiliation kink, but we can discuss it.
- Anything involving bathroom functions as part of sexual play.
- Anything that changes a queer character to a straight character. I am willing to consider changes in the other direction (writing Cassandra gay/bi, etc).
- Graphic violence/torture, angst for the sake of torturing a character
- Something that I consider to be grossly out of character for a canon character.
- Anything that makes me truly uncomfortable, but is not listed there.
How it works:
- Message me here on Tumblr with the basic idea for your story, and I will let you know if I have a slot available and think I can pull it off.
- If I accept the commission, I will send you a PayPal invoice with all details. Then you will email me all of your details!! Feel free to send aesthetics, pictures, moodboards, and any backstory that you think would be relevant to the story you want, as well as a full description of what you want.
- Once I receive payment, I will start writing.
- I will probably ask you a ton of questions as I write, and I will send you a draft to read and comment on once I am done. Please be patient! I work full time, and I want to make sure your story is perfect. Drabbles will be done quickly, but full scenes will not.
- If you want the story to be public, I will post it here on Tumblr and tag you, and you can reblog it. It’s totally fine if you want it to be private, though!
Here we go again folks! @scharoux continues to blow me away with her faith in me as we take Rhaella on this journey!
This long fic picks up almost directly where The Last Game last left off - with Rhaella pregnant and alone in a world where Solas has removed the Veil, despite her attempts to stop him. Rhaella has now escaped Kirkwall (and Solas) with Merrill in tow.
My Ko-Fi || My Commissions
Part One of Lost Horizon can be found here
Part Two of Lost Horizon can be found here
Other pieces about Rhaella I have written include:
1. All Things Green and Growing
2. The Long Road Back
3. The Turning of the Year
3. The Same Kind of Scar (contains explicit content)
4. World Without End (contains explicit content)
5. The Last Game Pt. 1, the Last Game Pt. 2, and the Last Game Pt. 3 (contains explicit content), and the Last Game Pt. 4
Pairing: Rhaella Lavellan x Solas, post-Trespasser
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Other parts of the series contain directly referenced character death for a character from DAI, implied character death for characters from DA2, and general references to death and destruction.
This section contains depictions of childbirth.
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At least they managed to get to the Emerald Graves without any problems.
Rhaella could count that as a blessing.
She cried herself to sleep more often than she didn’t, claimed she needed to take a break from riding because her back was sore when really she wanted to duck behind a tree and sob into her folded arms out of Merrill’s earshot - but at least they’d made it to the Emerald Graves. Beautiful, terrible, full of history. It was oddly soothing to be in a place that outwardly reflected what she inwardly felt, where past and present and heartbreak already collided.
It was not soothing to see so many spirits there.
These were not just the simple wisps that had followed them to Skyhold - these were fully matured spirits that could approach them and speak to them, or command them to go away, as did one spirit of Command as they entered the Graves.
Spirits with fully formed personalities who might pass on word of two elven women, one of them heavily pregnant, making their way through the Emerald Graves.
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay here after all,” Merrill said as it became apparent that they were everywhere, and not just in one isolated part of the region.
Rhaella felt the tears well up all over again.
She was exhausted.
Exhausted in every way a person could be.
She had ridden hard and hoped hard and tried her best and she still had nothing to show for it but a plan that fell apart every time she tried to stitch it together. She just wanted to be safe. To have space to grieve. To prepare to welcome her son into the world. She couldn’t think of anywhere else they could go. The Exalted Plains were still a blasted wasteland and far too exposed by and large - nowhere really to hide, no safe warren to build her nest - who knew what any Dalish clan there would think of her - she couldn’t go further into the heart of Orlais - there was no time to cross the mountains back into Ferelden -
She was dimly aware that her breath was coming in shorter and faster, that the roaring in her ears had returned. Merrill’s hand was on her shoulder. None of that mattered, none of it could override the terror of how trapped she was.
Then, in a puff of purple smoke, there was Cole, eyes luminous, pale blond hair gleaming in the waning sun.
“Panicked, breaking but not broken - you have been here before and you will be here again and you will always pull through. Be still, friend. I am here to help.”
Cole’s hand went to her other shoulder. Rhaella’s panicked breath began to slow.
“What in the name of all of the Creators -” Merrill murmured. “Where did you come from? Who are you?”
“My brothers and sisters are worrying you,” Cole said, still looking only at Rhaella. “Do not be frightened. They will listen to me. I will tell them what a precious secret you carry, and they will keep it. I am here to help. I am always good at helping, aren’t I?”
Rhaella thought of the cheese and mint, the barrels full of daggers, the honey spilled on windowsills. A compassionate knife easing the pain of the dying. The tightness in her chest receded.
“Yes, Cole. You are.”
“Cole?” Merrill asked, bewildered. “Isn’t that a human name? Are you not a spirit?”
“Am I?” Cole asked, his voice laced with amusement. He had grown somehow since Rhaella saw him last. Perhaps he was more at home now that the Veil was gone, now that he was no longer torn between two worlds.
“Cole is a friend,” Rhaella said finally, rising, one hand on her belly, waiting to feel some movement from her child. When she felt it, the final bit of fear eased. “An old friend at this point, I suppose. He is also a spirit of Compassion.”
“And you knew him from before the Veil fell?” Merrill asked. She reached out and took hold of Cole’s hand. “And he has a body? But he can appear and disappear? I have never heard of such a thing. Are you like Anders and Justice, a spirit and a person sharing the same body?”
“No. I am only me. Only Cole.”
“Fascinating.” She dropped his hand and walked in a quick circle around the two of them.
Cole tilted his head, watching her progress. “Bright, buzzing, beautiful - your mind is full of shining gears. So much more clever than anyone ever gives you credit for. You and I will be friends.”
Merrill laughed - giggled, actually.
“Well, that’s settled then.”
A wave of exhaustion overcame Rhaella even as she smiled. “Cole, do you know somewhere safe for us? Somewhere we can settle in for a long time and remain undetected? We’ll need shelter, room to garden, fresh water…”
Cole nodded slowly. “I think so, yes. I will look, and tell the others not to speak of you.”
With another puff of smoke, he was gone.
“Do you think he can teach us how to do that?” Merrill asked, green eyes wide.
Rhaella snorted and shook her head. She did not have the energy to express it, not with her panic so recently gone and her belly so heavy and her back so sore, but she was grateful that Merrill was capable and intelligent and yet also innocent enough to still find wide-eyed joy in the broken world around them.
Cole returned a short while later and told them to follow him. He led them through the woods to a place where the land rose into two sharp cliffs on either side of them, drawing them down into a gorge. It opened up eventually into an elliptical clearing with trees and shrubs, flat grassy spaces, and a stream that poured through the rock face at the very end of it.
“It’s perfect,” Merrill said, pacing around. “Space enough for us to camp, to keep the animals, to start planting that garden.”
“Only one way in and one way out,” Rhaella said, eyeing the high sides of the cliffs around them. “If someone finds us, we’re trapped here.”
“We’ll set daily wards far enough away from the entrance that we’ll know if someone gets too close. A second layer behind that so we can be certain they’re headed in our direction. That will give us time to prepare to move on.”
Rhaella nodded. The exhaustion felt stronger now that the possibility of rest was so close. She nodded at most things that Merrill said from that point on - about the location of the garden, about the idea of making a small pen for their mounts, about making a lean-to to provide better shelter for them. She nodded and nodded until finally their bedrolls were set up and she could lie down and seek oblivion.
*
Rhaella woke from that oblivion in a flowering field - a clifftop, overlooking waterfalls. She recognized it at once. It was the place she had gone with Solas when he saved her from death in the Crossroads. When they made love for the first time. They had sat here together and talked. It was a beautiful place, if bittersweet now. Bitter because it was yet another place where he left her - sweet because it was the place where their child had been conceived.
She felt the warmth of the sun on her cheeks and tilted her head back and closed her eyes and let herself focus more on the sweetness than the bitterness for a moment. She was going to be a mother soon. Something she had wanted but feared would never happen. She would always have a piece of Solas - of the man she loved still, she could admit that here, surrounded by wildflowers and sunshine - and she was grateful for that. Grateful that it had happened. She breathed in deeply and let the warmth of the thought fill her, crown to toe.
It spread, tingling all over her skin, warming her back - and then there were arms around her, and the warmth was coming from someone else’s body holding her close.
“Ma vhenan,” he whispered softly.
And that was when Rhaella realized what had happened.
She was in the Fade.
She had gone to sleep without taking Merrill’s draught, without setting her own mental wards through meditation.
The arms around her were Solas’s.
She stiffened in his embrace. She felt his arms loosen. She could stand, escape from his arms. Turn and scream at him. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to be held. To be safe in his embrace, to soak in his warmth, to turn and kiss him. She loved him. You couldn’t hide that kind of thing here in the Fade. It shimmered around you like the haze of a late summer afternoon.
She relaxed and felt him relax in turn, hold her closer. She breathed in the familiar smell of him, felt the beating of his heart, felt how her own ached and sped up at how much she longed for these moments with him still, after everything that happened. She heard him sigh, felt him nuzzle against her hair and breathe her in. She rested her hands on his forearms where they wrapped around her waist and felt tears rise in her eyes at the feeling of her palms on his bare skin, how good it felt. That simple connection that he had broken when he broke the sky open.
They lingered there like that for a while - how long she could not say, because love and time both felt infinite here - and then he finally spoke.
“Come home.”
That broke the spell.
“No,” Rhaella said. She started gathering her strength so she could wake. Had he been trying to locate her while they held each other? Had he figured out where she was? She couldn’t risk another second longer in his company.
“Rhaella, please -”
She pulled free of his arms but then his hand was on her chin, thumb on her lips, not holding her, not grabbing her, but cupping her. Longing for her.
She glanced back at Solas over her shoulder then, and it was like looking into the sun. His blue eyes, his freckles, the sharp angles of his face. His grief blinded her.
Ma vhenan, her heart sang back to him, but she did not let the words slip free.
“Come home,” he said again.
“No,” she said, and woke.
*
It was jarring to be back in the grotto with Merrill standing over her. Rhaella could still hear the roar of the waterfall in her ears. Could still smell the wildflowers. Could still smell him, feel him, at her side.
“Are you well?” Merrill asked. “I didn’t want to wake you but you were murmuring and twitching. Did you enter the Fade?”
Rhaella sat up and pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eyes, until her vision danced with spots of color. When she opened them again, and her eyes adjusted, she felt clear of the dream at last.
“Yes,” Rhaella said. “He was there. Solas.”
“Fenedhis. Did he figure out where we are?”
Rhaella thought about it a moment. She thought about the way he’d clung to her, the look on his face when she pulled away, how he kept asking for her to come home. Begging, really.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he was really hoping that I would tell him. Or that I would just agree to come home. I didn’t get the sense that he was using his magic or trying anything covert.”
“He is the Dread Wolf,” Merrill said darkly. “The trickster. We can’t be certain. If you do really want to stay away from him, we have to assume that he would use an opportunity like that to track us. We can’t let you get so exhausted that you forget to take the draught or to guard yourself in the Fade.”
Rhaella imagined it again - the flowers and the water and the breeze and the sunshine and his arms around her. She ran her hands over her belly and imagined he was there with her, rejoicing in the new life they had created together. She imagined him being there when their son was born, the joy in his eyes when he held him.
Then she took all of those feelings and wrapped them carefully in a box and put them away.
“Yes,” she said to Merrill. “We will be more careful. I don’t want him to find us here.”
*
For two weeks, Rhaella and Merrill had space to breathe.
Not much space to breathe, of course - the opening they’d found in this ravine was not large, nor was the grotto in the shelter of the rock where they’d set up their shelter. But it was a sliver of peace in two lives that had not known much peace, especially not in the last several years.
They settled in at once with the practice of two Dalish women who’d been on the move many times before in their lives - arranging shelter while keeping an eye on the prevailing winds, designating latrine space well away from their fresh water supply, ensuring the animals had access to the water but likewise wouldn’t spoil it. And, of course, Rhaella’s favorite task - setting up a garden.
It was the garden that brought Rhaella the greatest peace in those two weeks, even more so than the fact that she no longer spent hours in a saddle, even more than the whisper of wind through the trees rather than the clamor of a city, even more than the fact that she could take a nap whenever she wanted to now. This had always been the thing that centered her, brought her peace. Her fingers in warm, dark earth, coaxing things to grow. It was how she and Solas had first begun to connect after all, wasn’t it? That gully in Crestwood, the blood lotus, their hands meeting in the rain.
Rhaella imagined connecting with her son over these same things. Showing him how to test the moisture in the soil, how to space the seedlings apart, which plants made good bedfellows and which ones didn’t. That was what brought her the most peace. The idea that she could build a life for her baby now, however small, however imperfect.
She was beginning to feel better about the idea of her son arriving soon. She and Merrill had no idea when it would be exactly, of course, but it had to be soon. Rhaella was big as a harvest moon in the autumn sky, heavy and tired every day now, working on the breathing exercises she’d once helped her Keeper teach other women in Clan Lavellan. She hadn’t yet reached the point of despair some women reached, where they became convinced the baby would never come, where the sheer weight of the waiting began to crush them. She didn’t think she would reach that point.
Your father made sure I was ready to wait for things with no idea of when they’d come. Thinking that they would never come.
Merrill was the only one who regularly ventured out of the grotto in those two weeks, mostly for the purposes of hunting. She reported hearing other elves nearby, though she never interacted with them. Some were Dalish, some Orlesian, and still others spoke Elvhen, the kind the two of them had only heard spoken by the likes of Abelas and Solas.
“I can mostly understand them at this point, and it didn’t sound like they were looking for anyone in particular,” Merrill reassured Rhaella. “I think they had just awoken from uthenera. They were trying to understand what happened, and find their way to civilization.”
That eased Rhaella’s tension. She had been vigilant about preventing exhaustion, about meditating before sleep, about taking Merrill’s herbal draughts. She had not entered the Fade since that night that Solas came to her, and she had not been using her magic either. She didn’t like the full feeling that gave her, like snaps of electricity might spring from her hands without her control the way they had when her magic first manifested, but it was a necessary evil for now. Eventually - someday - it would not be like this.
She was going to live forever now, after all. Wasn’t she?
When Rhaella was working in the garden one day and felt the staticky change in the air, she thought it was her overripe mana at first. Then she looked up at the sky, saw the high, billowing clouds in the distance. She took a deep breath and breathed in the metallic smell of oncoming rain.
“There’s going to be a storm,” she called back to Merrill, who was busy with something near their bedrolls, her back turned.
Merrill mimicked her at once - looking to the sky, smelling the air.
“You’re right. A good summer thunderstorm, and a strong one at that. I’ll work on blocking off the entrance to the ravine so the animals can’t escape if they are frightened by the thunder and lightning.”
Merrill tucked away whatever she’d been working on quickly enough that Rhaella felt a pang of confusion and curiosity. She didn’t pry further, though. Merrill had done more than Rhaella had any right to deserve since they escaped Kirkwall.
Then Rhaella felt another pang, not in her chest but lower down, in her belly and back. A tightening like a giant hand had come down and squeezed her whole midsection. The back of her neck prickled and her heart sped up.
Could it be - ?
It was better to just keep busy and keep moving. There was so much to do before the storm came. (Her belly tightened.) She wanted to check the trellises for the plants in the garden and ensure that they were secure. She wanted to wrap the baskets with their provisions in oiled cloth so that if water reached them they would not spoil. (Her belly tightened.) She wanted to move their bedrolls further back into the grotto, under the overhang of rock, and then cast a barrier so none of the elements could reach them. (Her belly tightened.) Could she sustain barriers over the garden and their animals, too? Barriers were simple spells and if she cast them without any particular flare, and cast them quickly, they would not attract anyone to them -
This time when her belly tightened, it stopped Rhaella in her tracks, locking up her breath within her chest. It came with a wave of pain bright and coppery as blood.
“Rhaella? Are you well?” Merrill’s voice broke through and Rhaella could breathe again.
“I am,” she said, even as nervous flutters filled her chest and stomach in the wake of the pain, as she considered what it probably meant.
“You can take a rest,” Merrill said. “I can finish the preparations for the storm.”
Rhaella had only gotten through half of her list. She couldn’t allow Merrill to take on everything else.
Her belly tightened hard when she started over towards their dry goods with the oiled cloth, and her steps slowed to a crawl, until she finally had to concede and stop moving. She felt Merrill watching her even through the pain that came with it, spiraling up her spine.
“Barriers,” Rhaella managed at last, after what felt like an eternity. “Could you help with some barriers? Just to keep the worst of the wind - ” The pain was lingering now, slinking through her body even when the tightness was gone. “Off of the plants and the animals and our provisions.”
“Of course,” Merrill said. “Are you certain you don’t want to rest?”
“Positive,” Rhaella said. If anything she felt the need to move and pace, however slowly she moved. Something was happening in her body, something she’d seen happen to dozens of women before her when she still lived with her clan, but something she still feared to name out loud.
So she did move, continuing over to the dry goods and kneeling down, wrapping each woven basket up in its cloth, pausing when another contraction hit her to rest her forehead on her arms. She could use the word now, she knew what was happening. Her child was on its way, and even just thinking the words filled her with twin tendrils of anxiety and excitement. She knew she should tell Merrill but the clouds were thickening and the chemical smell of rain was picking up and it would break soon, and sometimes this phase of labor went on for hours and hours anyway, and Merrill had already done so much for her -
Her belly squeezed tighter and tighter and pain burst behind her eyes in fractal patterns like lightning, and she leaned against another basket of dry goods and did her best to breathe through it, reminding herself to soften her jaw, to unclench her hands. Tried not to wonder what her baby would look like, if she would see Solas’s eyes looking back at her in a few hours.
Tried not to think about what was now irrevocable, undeniable - Solas would not be there for the birth of his child.
The sky darkened and their mounts wickered nervously and the wind picked up and Rhaella had just made her way into their sleeping quarters and laid down when the storm burst above them with a crack of thunder and a cascade of rain. Merrill cast her final barrier, sealing them into the grotto with a shimmer of magic light. The rain hit the barrier and flowed over it, almost like a waterfall, so ethereal and lovely that for a moment Rhaella just watched it, heedless of anything else around or within her.
Then - another contraction, so sharp this time she cried out, and a rush of wet between her legs.
“Now then,” Merrill said calmly, appearing at her side. “Don’t you think we ought to discuss the fact that you are having a baby today?”
Rhaella could not help but laugh, however weakly, as the contraction ended. The next one came on quicker, though, and then she was not laughing.
Merrill hummed to herself, barely audible above the sound of the storm outside, as she set about making preparations. She poured water from one of their sealed jugs into the pot they used for cooking and summoned heat into her hands so she could warm it to boiling, even though they always purified it before they put it in the jugs. She laid a large clean cloth beneath Rhaella and neatly folded several others nearby, and unrolled a pack of surgical tools that was part of any good Keeper or First’s pack at all times. Rhaella tried not to look at those. She tried to focus more on the excitement than on the nerves. She was going to meet her child at the end of all of this.
Lightning flashed while Rhaella labored, illuminating the grotto and casting severe shadows everywhere she looked. There was little room to stand and walk but Merrill encouraged her to move through different positions, to sway and rock and do anything she could to distract herself from the pain as it grew, grew, grew. Merrill fed little whispers of magic into her belly, just enough to dull the pain, but every time it seemed to come back stronger. The wind roared outside and her world narrowed down to just how much it hurt, how each hurt was coming faster and faster and stronger and closer together and how there was nothing but pain and the sound of the rain and Merrill’s cool hands soothing her, soft encouraging words that Rhaella could not longer hear or understand. There was only the pain and the present and the feeling that both were neverending - and then, layered on top of it, a sudden terror - the realization that this was real and if the pain ever did end she would be a mother and she wasn’t going to be enough for her son, she knew that already -
“You can do this, Rhaella,” Merrill said over and over again. “You can do this.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t know how to this on my own -”
“You’re going to be just fine, lethallan. You have everything you need within you.”
“But I don’t have him, I don’t have -” Even in the haze of her pain she cut off the thought. No. She didn’t need Solas here. She didn’t need him at all.
“You have made it this far on your own power. You have everything you need, lethallan. I believe in you. All of our ancestors are here with you in this moment, and they are giving you everything you need.”
The next sensation that overpowered her was a deep pressure, a need to push that overwrote the feeling of pain swarming every part of her. She had to, had to, had to push, had to push right now, had to push as hard as she could, had to push even if it was going to break her, and she feared it might, and Merrill wanted her to try sitting up or moving to all fours but she couldn’t do it, not without him -
“Solas!”
The name was torn from her lips, primal as the sound of the storm, and she wished in that moment that he was as powerful as everyone said he was, that he might appear at her side, summoned like a spirit, and take the pain away, tell her he was here, that she was going to be okay.
But he didn’t come, and that was what she really wanted anyway, wasn’t it?
There was no more thought after that, only the pain and the urge to make it stop - and then, finally, one last long hard push, and there was a tiny, squalling, red-haired infant in Merrill’s hands. The pain evaporated and there was only wonder.
“You have a daughter,” Merill said, smiling, exhausted.
A daughter.
Not what she had imagined, expected. But small and perfect and nestled against Rhaella’s bare chest now, squirming and crying and balling up her tiny little fists. Rhaella felt tears of a different sort streaming down her face as she held her there, skin to skin, close as close could be.
“Hello, little one,” she said again and again over the cries as they quieted. “Hello, hello, hello.”
Then her belly tightened again, hard, and the pain and the pressure were back.
“What’s happening?” Rhaella managed as she felt the urge to grit her teeth - to push again.
“The afterbirth, most likely,” Merrill said, though even she was frowning as she felt Rhaella’s belly.
“No, this feels - this feels like what just -” Rhaella’s breath began to quicken again. She held her daughter back out to Merrill. “Take her.”
And just like that, like a nightmare that would not end, like a dam breaking, the pain flooded her all over again, coursing through her body, tearing another scream from her throat. She had to push, push, push again, but her daughter was already here, she wanted to hold her, she wanted this to be done -
And then there was more crying - another infant in Merrill’s hands.
“Creators above,” Merrill murmured, and then looked up, smiling. “You have two daughters.”
Rhaella laid back against the pillows they had arranged behind her, and held out her arms.
Merrill nestled both babies into Rhaella’s arms, and she held them, and studied their fine copper hair, the scrunched red faces. She marveled at how they both curled against her instantly, as if soothed by her presence. Her daughters. She had two daughters. How was she going to feed and care for two babies?
The ‘how’ didn’t matter, actually. She was going to do it. She already loved them both so much that it paralyzed her and gave her wings. She had two daughters.
Merrill checked them over while they cuddled against Rhaella and pronounced that they were both healthy, and that Rhaella herself was in good shape - nothing a little healing magic wouldn’t repair, which Merrill performed quickly. Rhaella wanted to sleep but she didn’t know how she would take her eyes off the two perfect marvels that were now spreading out their limbs, turning their little heads, exploring, suckling at her breasts. She didn’t know how she would ever sleep again when she wanted to memorize the exact slant of their little pointed ears.
“Thank you,” she said to Merrill when she finally remembered that there was a world beyond her two tiny daughters. “Thank you.”
“Thank you for trusting me to be part of this moment,” Merrill said, smiling. She looked worn out too. The storm was still going, though not nearly as intense as before. Rhaella wondered how long she had labored for. “I did have one more gift for you - though in hindsight, it is not enough.”
Merrill went over towards her side of their grotto and rustled around. She returned carrying a small woven cradle. Rhaella thought back to all the times she’d seen her friend working secretively over the last two weeks, hiding things away, and her heart was so full of joy and gratitude that it broke open again, and tears welled out from her eyes.
“I will have to make a second one, but they should both fit for now,” Merrill said, considering.
“I do not deserve your kindness,” Rhaella managed, barely a whisper.
“Of course you do,” Merrill said. “Everyone deserves kindness. And you have done so much for our world. It is the least I can offer in return.”
Rhaella let the tears fall a little longer. One after the other, her daughters fell away from her breasts, calmer now.
“Would you like to hold them?” she offered.
“Always,” Merrill said, arms outstretched. “That’s the best part of helping, isn’t it?”
Merrill smiled and cooed at them and Rhaella watched her and tried to wrap her mind around it all. She’d done it. She’d had twin girls. She’d borne Solas’s children, and he was not there. She had a family now, so many years after the family she’d known had disappeared. It was not exactly how she’d imagined how it would happen - perhaps not even how she’d wanted it to happen - but she’d done it, and she was beginning a new chapter in her life now. A happier one, because these two girls were in it.
“What will you call them?” Merrill asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Rhaella laughed weakly. “I was convinced I would have a son.”
“That’s a decision for later, then,” Merrill said. “Rest now. I’d say you’ve earned it.”
They settled the girls into their bassinette, and as much as she’d thought she would stay awake forever watching them, Rhaella felt her eyelids growing instantly heavy, her whole body dropping like a stone into sleep, and then there was darkness.
*
When Rhaella woke she was in the field of wildflowers again - the high plateau overlooking the waterfalls. It was peaceful. Lovely. Quiet. Her shoulders and chest felt lighter than they had in years. She tipped her head back and felt the warmth of the sun on her face and let out a long, slow breath. She was going for a walk through this field. She had all the time in the world.
(There was, in the back of her mind, a small prickling, a little spike of doubt like a stubborn weed. But she knew that she deserved this moment. She knew this field was safe.)
The flowers and tall wild grass brushed soft against her fingers as she walked. She breathed in their scent - herbal and sweet and sharp and earthy. There was a river at the other end of the plateau. She’d walk there and let her feet dangle in the water. It had been such a very long time since she rested - really rested - and she had earned this.
(She knew, with all her arcane training, that something was off here - but she did not care.)
The river rushed over a bed of colorful rocks - tans, peaches, browns, creams, all rubbed smooth by eons of running water. Rhaella lifted her skirts and stepped into the river, feeling it pull at her ankles and cool her skin, enjoying the pressure and texture of the rocks against the soles of her feet. She’d been on a long journey, and this was her reprieve. She closed her eyes, and tipped her face up to the sun, and it felt warm enough to banish every winter to come. The sound of the wind through the field and trees filled her soul.
She opened her eyes, and the wolf was there on the other side of the river, looming large and black as the abyss of night.
He sat there on his haunches, and even without the six glowing eyes, she knew him.
Her reprieve was over.
“I’m not in the mood for parlor tricks. What do you want, Fen’Harel?” she said, words sharp as glass.
Smoke blurred the form of the wolf and when it cleared Solas was there, forehead creased with sadness, eyes so blue they pierced her like arrows. There was some pride left in the straightness of his spine - but his shoulders were slumped forward. Not enough that a casual observer would catch it, but enough that she did. She’d struck true and deep with her words.
“I wanted only to observe you for a while. To have the hope that you might look upon me as another part of this scene and not as something you hated.”
Vhenan, why? Why would you smash everything up and then sit and cry amongst the pieces?
“If you didn’t want me to hate you, you shouldn’t have done something so hateful.”
“Please -” he started forward, bare toes touching the river now. “You know it was not an act of hate. You know I wished there was some other way. You know I tried to find another way. But it is done now, and there will be no more secrets or lies between us. I lived a life wrapped up in secrets and I have torn them all away now. I only want you. Our life together. Please -”
Another step forward, and the river lapped around his ankles.
Rhaella did not move.
“You’ve spoken sweetly to me before and brought me only pain afterwards. This is just another one of those times.”
“Vhenan, that is not true. I have meant every sweet word I have ever spoken to you. I mean them now. I cannot keep you safe when you are apart from me like this.”
“You didn’t seem to care if I was safe or not the first time you left me. Why do you care about my safety now when I am the one who left you?”
“Rhaella, you do not know the stakes. The people who are out to find you now - the Evanuris - even you cannot stand before them unaided. And you must think of our child. Come back to me before they arrive, and let me protect you both - let me be the person I have always wanted to be, before all the lies - a man who loves and is loved. Let me be there for my child.”
Rhaella opened her mouth to reply, but at that moment a strong breeze whipped across the plateau, stripping flowers from their stems, bending the trees, bringing with it the scent of water and earth and new life -
And carrying the sound of a crying infant.
Solas went utterly still.
His jaw dropped slowly down.
“Rhaella -” he began, voice hoarse, pleading.
She woke.
*
“Rhaella. Rhaella.”
It wasn’t Solas’s voice that greeted her on waking, but Cole’s. He hovered over her, moon-pale eyes wide and unblinking. Rhaella came back to her body. She was sore and exhausted in ways she had never been, and her breasts were full and tingling, and she remembered it all abruptly.
My daughters. I had my daughters.
They were crying in their bassinette. Her heart leapt at the sound. Nothing on earth could have kept her from them in that moment. Not even the member of their father standing stock still in the river, eyes as wide as if he’d been dealt a killing blow.
Merrill was hovering over the bassinette, hushing them.
“I wanted to let you sleep a little while longer, but it seems they need you,” she said as Rhaella knelt beside her. Rhaella reached into the basket and touched her daughters, one after the other. Their warm full bellies and their soft rosy cheeks and their little balled fists. She reached for one of them, preparing to lift her. She was dimly aware that the storm had passed, that a thin, eerie mist had snaked its way into the grotto. That something felt wrong. But all that mattered was her two little girls, and she was going to care for them, and she wasn’t going to cry over the memory of their father standing there alone, betrayed.
“There is no time,” Cole said, his voice soft and urgent.
“What is it?” Rhaella asked, though her stomach had already dropped into her toes.
The air was too still. Then Merrill’s head jerked up suddenly, like a horse that had heard the snap of a twig. There was no sound - but Merrill was the one who’d placed the wards well outside the ravine. The one who would know if someone was approaching.
Cole straightened slowly, his gaze distant and unfocused, as he followed Merrill’s gaze.
Hi everyone! I am still out of the country, but I am opening commissions as soon as I get back.
Slots will be available on Monday, December 2nd! I am guaranteeing that these commissions will be done by Christmas, so now is the perfect time to get one as a gift for someone :)
Read on for more info!
$15 Drabble - 500-750 words, SFW or NSFW. This will be a more “focused” moment in time, or a stream-of-consciousness-y character/relationship study.
Examples: “Swearing” (NSFW, 300 words); “The First Time” (500 words). “Keeping Tabs” for @ladynorbert and “Begin Again” for @laskulls are also in this category.
$30 Small Scene - 1500-2500 words, SFW or NSFW. Scenes in this category will be more condensed than full scenes, so they most likely won’t be plot heavy, but they will have a lot more detail than a drabble. “A Closed Loop,” which I did for @thevikingwoman, is a good example.
$55 Full Scene - 4000-5000 words, SFW or NSFW. This will be a more full scene with a beginning-middle-end arc.
Examples: “Never Alone,” an NSFW fic trade for @hansaera that is 5000 words. "The Turning of the Year” for @scharoux is another good example that is SFW! Most of my other one-shots and prompt fills also fall into this range. You can check them out on my Solavellan or Marian x Merrill masterposts.
$250 Long Fic - Slots for this kind of commission are currently closed. up to 25,000 words, SFW or NSFW. Exactly what it sounds like - a multichapter long fic that essentially gives you a discount off ordering multiple full scenes! This is the only type of commission that I will accept partial payment for - we will work together to figure out how much you will pay and when. I did this for @scharoux with “The Last Game,” which has 4 parts.
I will write:
- For the Dragon Age fandom. I have played all 3 games several times and while there are some characters I have not written much, I am willing to talk about any of them. I am most experienced with Inquisition characters.
- Smut! Please see below for what kinks I am not comfortable with.
- Underage (especially nothing with any pedophilic tones, and nothing where one character is an adult and another is not), incest, and noncon. This includes rape fantasies, even if they are consensual.
- I’m comfortable with some Dom/Sub dynamics, but full on master/slave dynamics are not quite my thing. I also don’t know how well I’d do with a full on humiliation kink, but we can discuss it.
- Anything involving bathroom functions as part of sexual play.
- Anything that changes a queer character to a straight character. I am willing to consider changes in the other direction (writing Cassandra gay/bi, etc).
- Graphic violence/torture, angst for the sake of torturing a character
- Something that I consider to be grossly out of character for a canon character.
- Anything that makes me truly uncomfortable, but is not listed there.
How it works:
- Message me here on Tumblr with the basic idea for your story, and I will let you know if I have a slot available and think I can pull it off.
- If I accept the commission, I will send you a PayPal invoice with all details. Then you will email me all of your details!! Feel free to send aesthetics, pictures, moodboards, and any backstory that you think would be relevant to the story you want, as well as a full description of what you want.
- Once I receive payment, I will start writing.
- I will probably ask you a ton of questions as I write, and I will send you a draft to read and comment on once I am done. Please be patient! I work full time, and I want to make sure your story is perfect. Drabbles will be done quickly, but full scenes will not.
- If you want the story to be public, I will post it here on Tumblr and tag you, and you can reblog it. It’s totally fine if you want it to be private, though!
STORY TIME. When I very first started playing DA:I, Josephine was the first character I was interested in romancing! I then somehow got misled into believing that she was only romanceable by men, and then Solas turned into a smooth motherfucker on me all of the sudden, and the rest is history.
BUT there is an alternate timeline out there where I never fall into Solavellan hell and instead Ellana is happy with Josephine forever and ever and ever.
ANYWAY, all of that is to say that I was so thrilled when @battlecouples asked me to write about Cashmere Lavellan and Josephine! Thank you for the chance to do this, my friend <3 I enjoyed it so much.
Pairing: Cashmere Lavellan x Josephine Montilyet
Rating: Mature. Heavily implied sexy times, but not quite explicit.
*********************
Cashmere Lavellan would forever remember the first time she met Josephine Montilyet. The chantry in Haven was dimly lit, but the candlelight only made the gold of her dress and the amber of her eyes glow all the more.
“Andaran atishan,” Josephine had said.
The first words Cashmere had heard spoken in her mother tongue since she left Clan Lavellan weeks before, and they laid on her soul like a balm. They conjured the deep green forests of the Free Marches - the smell of venison roasting on a spit - the voice of her Keeper as she imparted the secrets of magic and Dalish life. Everything Cashmere loved and cherished as First of her clan.
Maybe that made it inevitable that she would fall in love with Josephine.
She’d associated her with all things good from that very first moment. With home.
It helped of course that Josephine was beautiful as the wildflowers that covered the fields Cashmere had known and loved all her life, graceful as the halla moving through those fields, gracious as the sun’s warmth in summer. It helped that Josephine was calm, diplomatic, whatever storms faced them - and that that calm translated to Cashmere herself when she faced the legions of nobles that descended on Skyhold as the Inquisition’s fame grew. Josephine never once doubted her, even though their backgrounds could not have been more different - Josephine, scion of Antiva and Orlais and all its intricate beauties - and Cashmere, more at home among her big family in the woods.
Then again - Josephine was Cashmere’s home now.
That thought rang clear as a morning call from a hunter’s horn through Cashmere’s mind one morning, lying in bed with Josephine, the blankets a warm soft sea around them. They’d just returned from the untold beauty and peril of the Arbor Wilds, where Cashmere had seen the fruits of their shared labor. The gathered forces of all their allies, and Josephine orchestrating among them as much as Cullen did.
“I am so proud,” Cashmere had murmured against Josephine’s cheek, hugging her close.
“I am so proud of you,” Josephine had replied, pulling back, cupping Cashmere’s face. It was perhaps too intimate a gesture, given that they were not alone. But neither of them cared at that moment. They had come too far, been through too much, and death was waiting in the ancient trees.
But they were alone now, in Cashmere’s bedroom high in Skyhold’s towers. A luxury it had taken them time to win. There had been propriety to consider, once - but that was before Cashmere dueled for the right to Josephine’s heart in the streets of Val Royeaux, before it was so clear that the Corypheus’s endgame was so close at hand.
Cashmere intended to take every advantage of that luxury.
She moved closer to Josephine, put an arm over her waist, smoothed back the dark curls from her forehead. She slept with it in a loose braid and inevitably it was falling apart by morning, and Cashmere loved her lover when she wore silks and pearls and elaborate hairdos but she loved her most like this - soft, unbound. She rested her forehead against Josephine’s and breathed in the scent of the bergamot and lavender lotion she put on before bed. Josephine stirred, took a deep breath of awakening, and Cashmere savored that last moment before her lover really woke up. The beautiful angles of her profile, her aquiline nose, her lips parted softly in sleep - and then the flutter of her eyelids and her eyes drifting open, meeting Cashmere’s.
“Vhenan,” Cashmere murmured, rubbing her forehead against Josephine’s. Josephine took another deep breath and just that sound could still take Cashmere’s own breath away.
“Mi amor,” Josephine sighed, leaning in, kissing Cashmere, gentle and intimate and perfect, and this was what Cashmere fought for now - for these moments of quiet and warmth with this woman who could dazzle with words and wit and cunning but never dazzled more than she did now as she stretched and yawned and tugged Cashmere closer.
“We should get up soon,” Josephine murmured, and as always her Antivan accent was thicker now than it would be later in the day, less polished.
“No,” Cashmere said, not a command, not a suggestion - just a simple statement of fact. This bed was the world, wide as the sea that separated them both from their homelands. They, in fact, should not get up anytime soon when there was so much of it left to explore.
Cashmere rolled over, on top of Josephine now, and kissed her on the lips, slow and coaxing. Their bed was wide as the sea but their arms and hands and lips were all bridges, connecting them within that expanse, bringing them once again to their new home - the one they’d created together. The creation of that world might seem, to many others, as unlikely as most of the other things that had befallen Cashmere since the Conclave. It had once seemed that way to Cashmere herself. Now it was as inevitable and right as sunrise in her mind.
Josephine murmured into the kiss, looped her arms around Cashmere’s neck, and Cashmere felt the softness of her lover beneath her as the kiss deepened - the curves of Josephine’s breasts and hips and thighs, all barely hidden by a white cotton shift with delicate eyelet lace at the collar. She could not resist kissing around that lace, committing Josie’s collarbone and neck to memory, taking in the brown skin that peeked through the holes in the lace. More importantly, committing to memory the sounds her lover made as she did so, the way she put her arms up over her head in a luxurious stretch, the way she arched her neck to the side so Cashmere could continue to kiss her all over, all the way up to the lobe of her ear.
“Mi amor,” Cashmere said, rubbing her nose against the place where she could feel Josephine’s pulse. The words were foreign and she knew she still did not roll the ‘r’ the way that Josephine did effortlessly, but she did not miss the way Josephine smiled and wrapped her arms more tightly around her.
“Vhenan,” Josephine echoed, and she still separated it into two syllables, as if it was two words and not one, or perhaps as if she was savoring each part of the word. It was as precious now as it had been months before to hear Josephine greet her in her mother tongue.
Josephine pulled Cashmere back down into another kiss, a hungrier one, her full lips parting to coax Cashmere’s own to open. There was teeth, tongue, and an aching tenderness wrapped around all the hunger. That tenderness wiped away thoughts of all else - of the doom that lurked nearer to them every day, of the magic snapping and seething in Cashmere’s left palm. It narrowed the world to the breath in their throats, the rocking of their bodies. Cashmere slipped one thigh between Josephine’s legs, felt their warmth and softness around hers, the heat between them. Josephine shuddered, canted her hips up, seeking that pressure, ran her fingers into Cashmere’s long white hair and kissed her harder, and then three times in a row, feather-soft, each one of them like a promise.
“We really do have meetings,” Josephine said, but her voice was breathless now, and she was rocking into Cashmere’s thigh with every word, needy little motions that only stoked Cashmere’s own need.
“Isn’t making them wait for us a sign of our own power and importance?” Cashmere asked, reaching up to cup one of her lover’s breasts, savoring the weight and fullness of them, the peaks she could feel through her shift.
Josephine bit her lip.
“You are too clever,” she said. “Using my own lessons against me.”
“You are too good a teacher,” Cashmere replied, readjusting herself, their legs fully entwined now so she too could ease the ache building within her, rubbing it against Josephine, feeling their rhythm change as they each tried to please the other.
“Cashmere,” Josephine said, dragging out each syllable of the name, even more lovely in her Antivan accent than it was in a Dalish one, somehow.
Cashmere kissed her again in response, slower and gentler this time. The flame that burned between them was something she wanted to keep alive forever. That thought occurred to her more and more now. She’d fought for Josephine, yes, and that was no small thing. But these small moments - morning sunlight, entwining her hands with Josephine’s as they moved together, breathing in the smell of her hair - were starting to mean even more than a dramatic showdown on the streets of Val Royeaux. These moments were the kind of thing you could build a life on.
Cashmere wanted that more than she wanted air.
“I love you,” she breathed against Josephine’s lips, feeling heat pooling and spreading within her own body at the warmth and press of her lover’s, at the sounds she was making. “Ar lath ma, I love you, Josephine -”
“Ti amo, I love you too -”
There were more whispered words and confessions, more grasping hands and teasing fingers and heady breaths, movements like the tide against the shore, and then they were both there, gasping, together, united in their own world, lucky and in love and alive.
“I will spend the rest of my life learning to deserve you,” Cashmere murmured when Josephine rose at last, stretched, began to assume her perfect posture and the masks she would need to get through her day, her mind already whirling through all its tasks, all the things she would do to make the world a better place. Cashmere could see it in her eyes as she moved to the nearby vanity and began brushing out her hair.
Josephine put down the brush and met Cashmere’s gaze in the mirror, and smiled.
“It is funny that you say that,” she said. “I often think the same thing about you.”
That was the most incredible miracle of all of this, after all. They’d come together from far off shores - Dalish and Antivan, First and diplomat - and each found an equal marvel in the other. They would get to spend the rest of their lives exploring those marvels, their differences and similarities, each one more treasured than the last.
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And here is our conclusion - for now! Once again my deepest gratitude to @scharoux for entrusting me with this story and these characters, and for being such a lovely friend and writing buddy <3
My Ko-Fi || My Commissions (New slots with discounted prices opening on Friday March 20th!)
Part One of Lost Horizon can be found here
Part Two of Lost Horizon can be found here
Other pieces about Rhaella I have written include:
1. All Things Green and Growing
2. The Long Road Back
3. The Turning of the Year
3. The Same Kind of Scar (contains explicit content)
4. World Without End (contains explicit content)
5. The Last Game Pt. 1, the Last Game Pt. 2, and the Last Game Pt. 3 (contains explicit content), and the Last Game Pt. 4
Pairing: Rhaella x Solas, Post-Trespasser
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Other parts of the series contain directly referenced character death for a character from DAI, implied character death for characters from DA2, and general references to death and destruction. They also contain descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding.
*************************
They had to move quickly.
Rhaella wasn’t even sure what she was grabbing or where she was stowing it. She was just picking up everything she could get her hands on and shoving it into a bag or a basket. Her daughters were crying, quiet and fussy, and every fiber of her being wanted to go to them, an ache so powerful it felt real, physical, but she knew that the best way to protect them was to keep going, keeping flinging the little life she’d built in two weeks into bags and knapsacks and baskets. Keep pushing past the pain in her body. A mage’s healing could only do so much for a newly delivered mother. It could heal the worst of the damage and dull the pain, but it was safest to let the rest of nature take its course.
So while Rhaella knew she should be lying down, resting, or caring for her daughters if they needed her, she also knew that she had to push through her discomfort, the same way she’d pushed through her agony after the fall of Haven, walking miles and miles in the driving snow. It would be even easier this time. She was doing it for them.
Cole reappeared at her side.
“Distracted and confused - they will wander for some time. There is a window, thin as spider-silk. We can escape. We must go now.”
Merrill rushed over. “Then we will. Here, Rhaella.” She held up a makeshift sling with ragged edges, clearly made from a torn up blanket. “For the babies.”
Rhaella felt a rush of joy and love that overpowered her fear and pain temporarily. My babies.
As quick and haphazard as she had been packing up their supplies, she was careful and gentle as she got them each into the sling and bound them tight against her chest. They were warm and heavy against her body and she wanted to stop and stare at them, to touch the soft down on their heads. Being swaddled so tightly against her seemed to soothe them at once, and that eased some of Rhaella’s own fear. She’d need to nurse them soon, she knew. She hoped they would not start to cry until they got somewhere else safe.
She hoped this would not be the life they led. Always running.
No, she didn’t just hope that - she would make sure of it.
Looking down at them, she knew she would always make sure that they were safe, that they had what they needed and wanted. She would move mountains to be sure of it.
Was that how Solas felt when he ripped out the Veil? So certain of himself, so certain that it was worth breaking the world in the name of his convictions?
The thought pressed against her breastbone, wormed towards her heart. She decided to ignore it.
“Here,” Cole said after she’d mounted Thistle with assistance from both of them. He was holding something red in his hands. “He would have liked the idea of keeping you warm and safe.”
It was Cullen’s cloak.
Rhaella took it from Cole, pretending her hands didn’t tremble as she did so.
“Perfect,” Merrill said, coming to rest beside Rhaella on her own mount. “It conceals the babies and it will keep all three of you warm. We’re lucky we found it at Skyhold.”
Rhaella could only manage a nod in reply. Lucky. That was not how she felt with that cloak wrapped around her. She did feel it when she glanced beneath it at the two tiny babies sleeping there - luck as incandescent as the sun. She would push through her pain, emotional and otherwise, for their sake.
And there was pain. Her body was not ready to ride and they both knew it. But she gritted her teeth and focused on nearby landmarks as they rode. I can make it as far as that next tree. As far as that next bend in the stream. I can do this.
All the while, she and Merrill were both glancing over their shoulders and off to the sides. Cole was flitting in and out of visibility as he went to check their surroundings in a wider perimeter, but neither of them could resist the urge to do the same. How narrow had their escape been? Was it possible that Solas and his men were following them in the shadows, waiting to close in? Every breeze in the trees, every flickering shadow, the very mist that snaked around the trees and shrubs and rocks, seemed to say so.
Rhaella just gritted her teeth harder and kept going. Her magic roiled within her blood - hot fire and the snap of lightning, ice so cold that it too would burn. She had not cast anything in weeks. If he came - she would stop him.
(But then she remembered his face - the naked despair - when he heard the sound of the babies crying in the Fade. He would never harm her or the girls. Would she really harm him?)
I can make it as far as that next tree.
Eventually, the mist began to dissipate. Thin grey light seeped through the trees. Not starlight anymore. Dawn. The girls began to wriggle and fuss against her chest - hungry no doubt. Rhaella realized that she wasn’t entirely sure if they’d been born before or after midnight. She’d have to ask Merrill if she kept any type of track. There was a new date to add to her calendar now, after all. A date to celebrate.
That, and not the pain, was what finally made her tug back on Thistle’s reigns. The awe those two tiny people filled her with. She deserved to stop and bask in it.
“I think I need to stop,” she called out quietly to Merrill. “They’re hungry.”
Merrill nodded.
“We’ve made excellent time away from the grotto. Cole, can you keep a lookout?”
Cole nodded, and disappeared in a wisp of purple smoke.
Merrill helped Rhaella down and together they led their mounts away from the path they’d been following and into the dense trees, until they found a suitable hollow in an old, gnarled oak where Rhaella could sit and be mostly concealed. Relief flowed through her instantly as she did so, aided by the magic that Merrill wove through her body at the same time, and then by the frantic mouths of her twins at her breasts. There was a little pain there, too, and she had to readjust one of them to ease it, but mostly there was just the wonder again. So small and so perfect as they nursed. Their little down-turned eyes, their pointed chin. Their reddish hair.
They looked so much like him.
She loved them so much already that it paralyzed her.
“They are lovely little things, aren’t they?” Merrill said softly at her side. “Have you thought of names yet?”
“Honestly? No,” Rhaella laughed. “I thought I was carrying a boy, so I didn’t choose any girl names - let alone two. Well - I had thought of Elera for a girl, just in case.”
She looked down at the two girls again. The elder of the two was on her left breast, and the younger on the right. Elera. She rolled the sound around in her mind.
“Yes. Elera for the eldest. But for this little one, I’m just not sure.”
Little was a relative term. Her younger daughter was actually quite plump, and apparently determined to become plumper based on the strength of her latch. Elera kept kicking and wiggling and making tiny sounds of distress while she ate, but her younger sister was content as could be.
“What about Siona?” Merrill asked. “Your younger girl seems as sweet as can be.”
Siona. It did indeed mean sweet. Rhaella studied the younger girl’s face, turning the name over in her mind the way she had for her older sister.
“Siona. Yes, I do like that. Elera and Siona.”
A rush of tears pricked her eyes suddenly, as if naming them made all of this even more real than birthing or nursing them had. These were the names she would say with tender affection and with irritation for the rest of her life. The names their friends would call them. Elera and Siona.
Eventually the two of them had drunk their fill and been burped, and then Rhaella had to lay them out on a blanket and change them. She took a quick moment to rub an elfroot salve onto her aching nipples and to slip away to change the dressing she’d tucked into her smallclothes, and then it was time to put them into their slings, put on Cullen’s cloak, and keep moving. She wanted so, so badly to just sleep. But she picked herself up, got back on the horse, and chose another distant tree to aim towards, reassuring herself that she could sleep when she got there if she still truly needed to.
Of course, once she reached that tree, she picked a new one, and told herself the same soothing lie.
Cole reappeared at their side, his long legs eating up the distance as he kept pace alongside their mounts.
“I have led them astray,” he said. “They have turned back the other way, walking away from us, back towards Kirkwall, but they do not know it yet.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank you enough, Cole,” Rhaella said.
“Of course you can,” Cole said, smiling his odd, charming smile. “Gratitude is always enough. You don’t measure it in numbers.” He looked to the road ahead. “I’ll go this way now, and start looking for somewhere new to camp. I’ll tell the spirits not to share our secrets like I did before.”
He was gone again.
The mist had mostly faded by that time thanks to the warming of the morning sun. Rhaella found that the increasing light didn’t come with as much relief from her paranoia as she might have hoped. Every lingering shadow might still hide Solas, or his men.
Or someone else who wished her harm.
She wondered how much truth there was to what he’d said in the Fade, and how much of it was a ploy to get her to return to him. Was she really being hunted by the Evanuris? Had he really failed to contain them? She wished he had not broken her trust so utterly, that she at least had some sense from him of what was truth and what was lies.
(But then there was a part of her that remembered that he very rarely lied, when you drilled down to the bedrock of the matter. That wondered if it was really just her grieving heart that was broken, that was clouding her judgment of the situation.)
In any case, all she had to do right now was keep half her senses on the babies, ensuring that they were comfortable and fed and dry, and the other half on keeping herself on Thistle’s back. Nothing else mattered.
An hour or so later, they reached a fork in the road. The right hand path led up over an exposed crest of hill, and the left led along the side of the hill, and seemed to drop lower still. It remained between the trees, and the last of the night’s mist lingered in its hollows.
“We would have a good vantage point from up there,” Merrill said, gesturing to the exposed path. “We could see everything around us, perhaps pick a good place to set up a new camp.”
Rhaella shook her head. The thought of being high up, exposed, made her skin crawl in a visceral way she couldn’t quite account for. She was instinctively touching each of her daughters at the thought.
“I agree, sadly,” Merrill said, sighing. “As much as it would be nice to be in the sunshine. If we can see everything, everything can see us. Let’s take the low road.”
Of course, what they didn’t realize about the low road was that it led through a ravine with sides of high stone, gray and mottled with dark green moss. Two primeval walls that rose like bones of the earth, and only narrowed the further into it they went. If pursuit came towards them, they would barely have room to turn around - and even if they did turn around, there was only one direction in which they could flee.
Rhaella’s chest tightened as the walls did. She looked to Merrill and saw the same blanched look of fear on her face. They shared a small nod, and both clicked to their mounts to move a little faster. The sound of hooves echoed through the ravine, bouncing from stone wall to stone wall, and then seemed to bounce around inside Rhaella’s own skull, and then seemed to burrow down into her heart, making it pound faster.
They made it out of the ravine.
It spilled them out onto a flat, open area ringed by a few trees, and low enough down below the ridgeline they could have climbed that even more of the morning mist lingered here. Rhaella’s mana surged inside her one final time, longing to send out feelers, to sense if anything was nearby them, a feeling nearly as strong as her urge to push had been a few short hours before. She tamped it down.
She didn’t need her magic in the end. Her eyes spotted the shapes in the mist moving towards them, and her ears caught the sound of hooves once more, and then the sun highlighted the golden greaves and flashing pauldrons of Sentinel armor. A large group of them, moving directly towards their position.
Rhaella and Merrill had time for one more frantic glance. Rhaella pulled on the hood she wore beneath Cullen’s cloak and ducked her head, and saw Merrill do the same out of the corner of her eye. Her whole body was full of another frantic impulse now - run - but she knew it would be too obvious if they did. They’d spent the last two weeks hearing plenty of other elves passing through, passing by. It wasn’t as if they were the only two female elves in the Emerald Graves. They had to simply ride past the Sentinels as if nothing was amiss, and hope that Elera and Siona didn’t make a sound, that Cullen’s cloak concealed Rhaella’s still-swollen belly well enough to avoid suspicion.
The two parties drew closer to each other. Rhaella could see them now when she glanced out beneath her hood, and her heart sank. It was a group of Solas’s men. She recognized them. More importantly, she recognized Abelas at the front of their party.
He was already looking at the two of them intently.
Rhaella kept her head down. That was all she could do. They would both keep their heads down and quietly ride past. They tried to do it. Merrill was on Rhaella’s left, and Rhaella was closest to the Sentinels. So, of course, it was Rhaella that Abelas approached.
“Hail and well met, traveler,” he said, his Elvhen melodious and formal as always. He was riding a horse, not a hart. Thistle was a little taller and Rhaella herself sat up taller than him as a result. She ducked her head just a little more, hoping he had not already seen under her hood, hoping that Elera and Siona would remain quiet and asleep against her chest, that they would not move or fuss.
“Hail and well met,” Rhaella replied in Elvhen, deepening her voice ever so slightly. Not quite a man’s voice - she was not skilled enough for that - but certainly not her own. Hopefully between that and the Elvhen, which Abelas had rarely heard her speak, he would not be suspicious.
“Have you encountered any trouble in this area?” Abelas asked. “We are tasked with keeping the peace as well as we can.”
So he wasn’t looking for her?
“We have not,” Rhaella said. “We are just passing through. We have an urgent appointment to keep. If you could excuse us -”
But she had already said too many words, fumbled one or two conjugations, and Abelas’s green eyes were narrowing.
“I do not recognize your accent, traveler. Where are you from?”
Rhaella did not answer. She shifted Thistle closer to Abelas’s horse, away from Merrill. She knew in her heart what would come next, and her heart did not lie.
Abelas reached out and pushed back her hood. He smiled a warm, welcoming smile.
“Lethallan,” he said, sounding relieved.
Lethallan. She was not his sister, his friend. She was not even one of his countrymen.
Rhaella turned towards Merrill and drew on all that magic energy that had been seething, snapping, roiling inside of her for weeks, and she called for fire.
The flames exploded upward from the ground and reached immediately for the sky, white hot, burning blue in places, stretching far to the left and far to the right. Heat rolled off of the towering wall in waves, bringing sweat to Rhaella’s brow immediately. She could just see Merrill through the flames.
Run, she thought with all her mind, all her heart, remembering every kindness Merrill had done her since they left Kirkwall, hoping she did see her friend again someday. Hoping that someday, somehow, there would be a way she could repay her beyond this desperate act.
Merrill’s horse reared, whinnying, and then Merrill took off at a gallop.
“Follow her,” Abelas said, confirming what Rhaella feared. Solas would never hurt her or their children. She knew that. But she did not know how he would see Merrill’s betrayal in all of this. She had given her friend the only thing that was in her power to give. Time.
The Sentinels tried at once to douse the flames, to find an easy way around them, but Rhaella had blocked the only path available to them. The flames ended on one side in solid rock, and on the other in a dense tangle of jungle that they struggled to cut through or burn themselves. And the flames themselves burned so high, so hot - so full of Rhaella’s desperation and her weeks of avoiding magic and the untamed energy that ran through all the world now that the Veil was gone - that they could not douse them.
Rhaella herself did not run. She knew it would not work, that she could not move quickly in her state, that she had to be careful to protect her girls, who were already squirming and stirring because of the heat of the nearby flames. She waited.
“Enough,” Abelas called to his soldiers finally. “She has escaped.” He turned to Rhaella, a little irritation showing on his usually impassive face. “That was unnecessary. Merrill was in no danger from us.”
“No physical danger, maybe. But she deserves the chance to live life on her own terms. I think she made it clear when she left that she doesn’t want any part of what you and the Dread Wolf stand for any more.”
Abelas sighed. “You know so much and understand so little, quickling child.”
Rhaella’s anger burned hotter within her chest again, and the flames responded, leaping higher once more. Siona squawked finally at Rhaella’s breast, and Rhaella turned and moved Thistle far enough away from the flames that they could no longer feel the heat. She pulled back the cloak just far enough to look down at her daughter and make soft, hushing sounds, putting her hand on her back.
Abelas’s eyes followed her.
“The child -” he said as he turned his own mount towards her and moved closer to her.
“Children,” Rhaella corrected, not meeting his eyes. She did not pull back the cloak or reveal her daughters. Not yet. She would give him information one drop at a time, and only when she chose.
His eyes widened a little - she could see that much out of the corner of her vision - but he did not respond immediately.
“So you will come with us willingly,” he said. “Back to our camp. To Solas.”
The name, as it always did, filled Rhaella with too many emotions to categorize. It was like trying to separate every color of sunset. Excitement. Dread. Anger. Hope. They all swirled together within her. She imagined him holding their daughters. She imagined him standing at the crest of Sundermount, tearing the world apart.
“Yes. For their sake,” she said. “They haven’t even lived a day in this world, and already their father is putting them in danger if I don’t follow you.”
Abelas shook his head.
“Their father will be relieved that we have found you. Now that he will know that you - all three of you - are safe, he can focus on the real danger.”
Rhaella thought back to Solas in the Fade. His frustration that she would not believe him when he said there were things loose in the world now that she could not protect herself from, however capable she was. Her own disbelief at his words, her immediate assumption that it was simply a ploy to convince her to return.
“What real danger?” she asked.
Abelas looked away from her.
“The wolf is being hunted once again,” was all he said.
And this time, Rhaella felt the animal terror those words evoked. It crawled up her spine and into her hair and made her whole body prickle. She followed Abelas’s gaze. He was looking towards the ravine, and even though she herself had passed through it, it was an alien place now - a slice of lingering night, cutting through the day, refusing to acknowledge the sun. Terrifying as the things that hunted the man who broke the world - the man she loved - ancient and unknowable as the depths of the sea.
It was the darkness Rhaella would have to walk into now. She had no choice. So she turned to follow Abelas as he rode back towards his men. She held her babies close. And she pretended she did not know fear.
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Pairing: Athelas Lavellan x Solas
Rating: General - vague references to emotional distress
***********
Athelas woke to the smell of bacon cooking, flooding the whole house with salt, grease, and smoke. She groaned with delight, not even opening her eyes yet. Was there anything better than that smell?
Well. Perhaps the fact that if she stayed in bed long enough, the man cooking it would bring it directly to her, and they would sit curled underneath their fluffy, downy comforter and enjoy it together.
Well. That and the fact that there was no way she could stay in bed, because her huge stomach was already pressing on her bladder, and she had to get up and go to the bathroom.
Both of those things just might be better than the smell of bacon.
Athelas rose, went to the bathroom, and then went to stand in the doorway that led out to the rest of their house to watch Solas cook, running her hand idly over the curve of her belly as she did so, feeling the wiggling life within. Only a few more weeks to go now, before she met whoever it was.
Solas was in a long loose tunic and leggings, humming idly as he cooked. The neck of the tunic had slipped to one side and she could see almost all of one of his pale, freckled shoulders. She wanted immediately to walk to him, kiss him there, but she held back. She also wanted to preserve this moment as long as she could. She wanted to preserve the slant of golden light coming through the windows, the exact shade of it, the motes of dust that flitted and sparkled through it - the reverberations of Solas’s humming in his chest, the little table near the kitchen, which he had already set for breakfast. Two round white plates, one of them with a chip on its edge. Forks and knives with wooden handles. A letter that one of them had opened and read the day before, then left carelessly on the table.
She wanted to preserve the simple blue curtains on their walls, the murals Solas had done on either side of the front door. She wanted to preserve the feeling of the wood floors beneath her feet - smooth and polished, but still with little ridges that puckered beneath her feet. She wanted to preserve every inch of it in her memory.
Because after everything she had been through - everything she had suffered - she was home. She was enough, exactly as she was. She was loved, exactly as she was.
It was not a thought she had articulated to herself in words quite yet. It had been a feeling building slowly like a sunrise ever since they moved into this house. Ever since this baby started growing within her. Behind it grew an even larger feeling, an even more important one. She was enough even before this house. She had always been enough, whatever anyone else said. Whatever the voices in her mind said.
Athelas Lavellan was never going to let that feeling go, she decided in that ordinary moment. Standing there, watching her lover cook, feeling her child move within her. She was going to come back to it over and over again, every time the feeling that she wasn’t enough threatened.
Solas finished cooking the bacon then, sliding it onto a nearby plate, reaching into the wire basket of eggs they kept on the countertop. He caught sight of her as he did so, and smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“Good morning, vhenan,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
Athelas let the spell break. She crossed the floor to him, wrapped her arm around his waist, and kissed that bare shoulder she’d glimpsed from across the room.
“Always. Especially for that bacon.”
Now she could feel his chuckle through his body, vibrating into her own, like a secret message.
“Good. I made extra just for you. I was going to add eggs and toast if you can be patient enough.”
Athelas had already taken a slice of bacon from the plate before he finished speaking, was already groaning in appreciation as she bit into it.
“Nope,” she said when she was done.
Solas laughed again, and it was a sound she had never heard enough of before, and now she got to hear it every day, and she was happy she had worked and waited and hoped for a world where that was possible. That she had never given up - or if she had, she had not allowed herself to give up for long.
She licked her fingers clean and then she gave Solas an affectionate pat on his rear.
“We should eat outside this morning. It’s a beautiful day.”
“Whatever you wish.”
He turned to look at her over his shoulder and she stood on tiptoe to kiss him, a sweet and gentle and full press of her lips to his.
“I’ll see you outside,” she said.
She sat down at the table in their garden and closed her eyes again, trying to press every inch of this new memory into her heart. The smell of the dew, the warmth of the sun, the dirt beneath her feet. She was enough. It did not matter what happened after this moment, or even what had happened before it. What mattered was the present moment. She would carry it wrapped inside her, just under her heart, for the rest of her life. She might lose track of the feeling sometimes, but she would never let it get far away again. She’d fought too hard to earn it.
Her child squirmed and kicked inside of her and Athelas dropped her hand to her belly once more.
You are enough, too, she thought. I will remind you of that every day.
Solas followed her shortly after, both plates balanced carefully on his forearms. He set one down in front of her, and then one at the other side of the table. Then he returned to her and knelt down, and pressed a kiss to the rise of her belly. He looked up at her and Athelas memorized the angles of his face all over again, the placement of each freckle, the blue of his eyes.
“You’re enough, you know,” she said to him on impulse. “Exactly as you are.”
Blood rushed into her cheeks immediately. Why had she said such a foolish thing? But then she saw the way Solas’s face softened, the way the color rose in his cheeks, and she knew it was the right thing to say. That these were words they would pass around their family like a prayer.
Solas kissed Athelas again, and they settled in to their breakfast, ready for whatever would come.
