#eilmare

You know I think this is one of those things that I’ve been meaning to write, but have never gotten around to? But oh, Ellana my sweet girl, she’s so attached to her vallaslin, and she’s been so proud of them ever since she got them – June’s, like her mother’s were, and her mother before her. Your hands are a creator’s hands, her mamae would always say – deft fingers moving quicker than her mind could come up with ideas, and her palms their own artworks of scars and callouses from years of trial and error. Woodworking is her speciality, and she whittles when she’s stressed, or to remind herself of home; she makes little trinkets for the others – tokens of good luck and nameday gifts, and her staff is pockmarked with designs she’s started on but never finished. But even though her inspiration is a bright-burning, always fleeting thing she never once doubted that her vallaslin were a good fit. They were hers, and they were earned, and so it kills her to get rid of them, but she just has so much trust in Solas, you know? So she believes him – she regrets it later, when she catches sight of herself in the mirror, and she thinks about what her late mother would think, and how her face doesn’t look right anymore. The freckles are too bright, somehow, the shape of her cheeks all wrong, because the markings were part of her, too, like her scars and callouses. It takes her a long time to come to terms with the choice – longer, even, than it does for her to get over Solas breaking things off.

Of course, then she finds him again, and two years’ worth of progress disappears with the sound of his voice, but she doesn’t feel relief to find that he was telling the truth, even as she stands before him, finally comfortable with her naked face, and her hands bearing callouses from more than her whittling knife.

But then she loses her arm – her hand, with its deft fingers and its scarred palm, and it takes her a few days but the moment she realises she can no longer whittle, when she finds herself reaching with phantom fingers for a knife she can no longer hold…