#levallen

Painting progress; with three versions. I like all three as an option. I now have to learn to paint clothing textures. I am not a fan. I do not like it. I learned a bit about scars. The scars in both Inquisition and Veilguard just get me the wrong way so. No reference for that. Doing a LOT of new things.

If I live, I’m coming to stop you.

Cole, of course, notices too. "It feels like him here. All new, faded for her."

"Feels like who?" Dorian has enough decorum to play stupid for her benefit, as if they don't all know who it is that Cole speaks of.

"Ellana knows." Cole peers at her from beneath his massive hat. "He has called you home."

Time works differently in the Crossroads. An hour spent trekking across floating islands passes as mere minutes back at the Winter Palace. It makes navigating the tense madness of potential invasion much easier logistically, but it plays hell upon her constitution. With every step through every Eluvian, the anchor twists and widens. It feels like the first time she grasped the torn fabric of the Veil and knit it back together, and the static heat pulls at her skin. It was easier, that first time, when he was there to guide her through it. Ever the teacher, and yet, in the end, he has left her in the dark.

Her worst fears are made real within the winding hallways of the Shattered Library. The scraps of thought translated to text, the pages torn from the dreams of strangers, the stolen confessions of the unwilling, it all weaves itself into an inexplicable tapestry of a deception so deep, it threatens to bury her. She stops reading them as the truth of it all settles over her like a second skin. Cole whispers of things he should not know and Bull let's her kill whatever crosses their path. Dorian fills the air with banal banter, and tries to distract her from the abyss opening in her heart.

Ethereal energy crowds at her seams, building and invading and demanding and cresting until she can take no more and detonates like a barrel of gaatlok. It throws everyone around her, friend and foe alike, into the walls of the Elven ruins and leaves her trembling on bruised knees. The anchor has ripped the essence of her in two, and the sundered Veil is powerless to keep the Fade at bay.

She is dying, just like she was meant to all those years ago. There is no delaying the inevitable; Solas taught her that. No, the universe had come to claim its due. An uneducated, wide-eyed Dalish elf who had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They called her Inquisitor and Herald and Holy and Good. They were wrong. She was no savior, not then, and she is no hero, not now.

She is a thief and her time in the sun is coming to a close.

Another explosion, another splash of blood, another tear of her frazzled edges. Another battle, another scream, another Eluvian.

His voice is as it always was, just as she dreamed of every night, deliberate and arrogant. It's soft cadence flows over her, a sound so familiar that she aches in remembrance. The frenzied impatience of their inevitable reunion spurs her forward, past the frozen statues of an irrelevant army. He reduces the Qunari woman to cold stone with but a look and her beaten body sings out for his magic, for his spirit, for him.

And he is there.

Fen'Harel, just as he always was, just as she dreamed of every night, powerful and proud. "Vhenan," he whispers and it is like coming home. Who is she, to have stolen the heart of a God? Nothing. No one. A nomadic elf who wore slave markings as a matter of cultural allegiance.

"Solas." She stares at him across the void he forced between them. His face is unreadable, but his eyes are kind. They were always kind, even as he was breaking her heart. Even as he is rending the known world asunder. "Fen'Harel."

His answers are ash in her lungs. She cannot listen to his excuses and reasons. The holy magic of his orb is ripping her apart and she needs him to make it stop, to clear her mind of its painful prison and give her the chance to breathe. He momentarily severs her connection with the Fade, leaving her utterly devoid of power, and her chest heaves with effort. His kind eyes cast pity upon her prone form and he tells her his story. A story she has no place in, not anymore. Her role has been acted out to its perfect end and she knows, in the way that she knew it was him the moment she set foot in the Crossroads, that he will not be swayed.

Still, she tries. Oh, she tries.

On bloodied knees, she pleads and reaches for him with the mangled remains of her left hand. The Trickster God kneels in the dirt before her and reaches back. He kisses her palm, her wrist, and every place they meet flares bright and bathes them in emerald.

"Let me come with you. I cannot bear the thought of you alone."

"Never. I will not have you see the monster I must become, Vhenan."

As he presses his lips to hers, their mouths meeting in all the ways that their lives cannot, he takes the anchor from her. She screams into him, and he holds them together, his deft and familiar fingers unweaving the very atoms of her skin. It is a bittersweet agony that she will never forget. When he pulls away there is nothing that remains of him within her.

"Will you sacrifice me for your new world? Will you build the foundations of your empire upon my bones?" Her voice breaks, betraying her anger and her indignation and her blind desperation. "Will you paint the gilded halls with my blood?"

"Never. I will not let this war take you."

"The Dread Wolf already has."

He steps out of her reach, just beyond her mortal grasp.

"I will find you, Solas. In every world, through every door, across time and space and any distance, I will find you. There is no where you can go that I will not kill myself to follow."

"I know."

"Will you let me?"

"I am powerless to stop you, Vhenan. I always have been."

"Who am I, to steal the heart of a God?"

"You cannot steal what was always yours."

More  Inquisition art!

More Paya.  She’s quickly becoming my primary Inquisitor for the purposes of headcanons

A dalish inquisitor being terrified of horses!!!! they're huge and she's small and they're terrifying!!!!

A dalish inquisitor not knowing how to turn down the request to race her graciously gifted horse round redcliffe farms bc f u c k t h a t

Blackwall calming the horse and holding its reins and guiding her hand to the horse's snoot

Asking him to help her up and he blushes as he has his strong hands around her lil waist and hoists her into the saddle

I had a dream where Solas and Lavellan came face to face, the old world ending around them.  Solas knows in his heart that he couldn’t kill Lavellan, so he instead put her to sleep for a few hundred years while he re-made the world the way he thought it should be.

Eventually, he removes the spell from Lavellan and she wakes up (having not aged because the elves have their immortality back).  Her body has been storing magic for all the years she was asleep, she she’s crazy powerful when she wakes up, and she is absolutely furious with Solas for what he did.

The details after that are hazy, but I can imagine Lavellan becoming Solas’ enemy, and maybe she’s angry enough to try and release the Evanuris.