#sheeeeeeesh

WHUMP.

Light flares around her, a brief, blinding explosion. She staggers up onto her feet, looking around.

Everyone is gone.

No-- not everyone. A single body lays stretched on the stone.

"Lucanis!" she shouts, hurtling towards him, a sort of frantic desperation sending adrenaline into every vein. Bellara... then Davrin... no more. No more.

But his body rolls towards her... and then it isn't Lucanis, but Varric, his eyes staring blankly up past her shoulder.

With a low gasp, she starts backwards, up on her feet again, and almost crashes into the figure behind her, whose voice is low and placid and familiar.

"And so you have your victory..." Solas murmurs. "You live... and Ghilan'nain does not."

She spins -- but he's gone, and reappears at her elbow, making her jump. "Are you not proud to finally reach this moment?" he whispers in her ear. She feels his fingertips brush lightly against her wrist. "Or did you think you'd win the day without some painful sacrifice?"

The body on the ground is Lucanis again, slowly petrifying into a stone mockery of himself.

This is a dream, Helena thinks. I'm dreaming. I'm having a dream-- but how? Just a moment ago she was pulling the dagger from Ghilan'nain's chest...

...wasn't she?

The world shifts, tilts crazily on its axis. With a shriek, Helena leaps to the side as one of the pillars from the ritual at Arlathan comes crashing down onto her head. But it doesn't strike her, instead passing through her to knock away the stone floor beneath her and send her falling into an abyss.

Voices. So many voices. A voice from every job she's ever taken, every mistake she's ever made in standing against the magisterium, and laid over that tapestry of sound she hears the more familiar, more recent and immediate, voices of her friends in the Veilguard--

Lucanis, shouting above the sound of dragonfire burning his home - "If we don't stop that dragon, people will die. Innocent people."

The chaotic screaming at Weisshaupt, the First Warden and Evka's conflicting orders as the Archdemon closed on them, and the meaty sound of Helena's fist on Glastrum's jaw.

And she falls, and she falls, and she falls through a nightmare landscape of floating rock and shattered architecture...

The blade catches briefly, and she grunts as the impact shocks up her shoulder, hanging her in place over an even deeper abyss.

"You and your friends stood against the gods." Solas is suddenly standing just above her, staring down at her with that infuriatingly cool gaze. "Your courage is laudable."

He flicks a hand and at his side appear three giant, battered stone statues. Dimly she can make out the forms -

Helena grunts, struggling to haul herself up the stone face. "Solas?" she gasps out.

"But mortals cannot win this battle," he continues implacably.

She goes still, staring up at him. Sudden realization is digging its claws in, followed by astonishment... followed by horror.

"I am sorry," he murmurs. "It is what it must be."

The statues collapse, knocking Helena with a shout into the open air, and then she is falling again, faster this time, out of control.

This time, while the voices she hears are familiar, the words are things she has never heard them say, things that cut as surely as the dagger in her hand.

Davrin> "I saved you, Rook. What was the point? You were never up to it." Harding> "You're worthless!" Neve> "Varric never believed in you!" Lucanis> "You're no leader." Emmrich> "You failed us all!"

Her friends' voices - but her doubts, all the uncertainties and insecurities and guilt that have followed her on every step of this exhausting journey.

She lands heavily with a grunt on another piece of floating stonework, flails for purchase on the nearest thing she can get hold of - and finds she has grasped the wrist of another statue, this one strange and blurred, not quite real but all too familiar, a frightened form frozen in the act of falling into darkness.

"What failure cuts your conscience now, I wonder?" Solas asks.

"Bellara..." Helena whispers, the name agony in her mouth.

More voices, mocking, disdainful, taunting her.

Bellara> "Your friend is dead." Lucanis> "Dead and gone..." Emmrich> "It was your fault." Taash> "Your fault."

No... she tries to say, but the word emerges as a ragged sort of sob. For a moment, the dream has her fully in its clutches, and she clings to Bellara with all her might, trying to drag her back from that precipice, holding on desperately to the dagger which has now sliced a hole in reality itself to lodge her in place.

"Regret, like all emotions, is a powerful thing," Solas says calmly. He stands some twenty feet above, looking down at Helena with a bewildering air of self-satisfaction. "It can bruise us. Break us. Or blind us to the truth. Regret is even strong enough to serve as the lock on a prison built to hold gods."

Slowly, implacably, step by step, he makes his way down through the floating ruins until he stands just behind her.

"But such a prison can hold any captive... even you," he murmurs.

Helena's eyes widen as he draws close enough to touch. She tries to swing her arm, to slash with the dagger and drive him back... but she finds abruptly that she can't move.

"No!" she cries, and it's a sound of rage, helpless fury, but it doesn't touch him any more than the dagger did.

"You were never ready to make the sacrifices that leadership requires," Solas says coldly. "So, through our connection, I molded you into someone the prison would accept in my place."

(A/N: !!!!!!!!!!

SOLAS YOU MOTHERFUCKER!

Honestly my descriptions and screenshots her do not REMOTELY do justice to how cool this sequence is. This twist feels extremely earned, the visuals are tremendous-- this is easily the best thing that has happened in this game and it's kind of a shame that it took eighty hours of playtime to get to it.

Helena is SO mad. Go fuck yourself, Solas.)

Realization, understanding - horrible and absolute. This is betrayal.

A chill lacerates up and down Helena's back. She struggles against the force holding her in place, thrashes her head to the side, then back--

Bellara is gone, a new form in her place, toppling downwards into the abyss.

"Varric?" she whispers.

Solas's hand twitches against hers, drawing the dagger hilt into his palm.

"Your work is done," he whispers. And perhaps the grief she hears in his voice is even genuine, but it doesn't matter. Unmoored from the last thing holding her in place, she falls with that strange shadowy echo of Varric down into the darkness.