#solamancy 2022

“I suppose not.” He smooths the corner of his bedding, brows coming together in thought. “Put like that, I’m uncertain as to whether you expect us to envy or pity him.”

“Both, I guess. Must be nice having one friend to mourn.” Solas can only nod in agreement. The concept feels alien to him, whose losses seem to pile together, one after another after another. They call to him like echoes in an empty room, a cacophony that shakes dust from the rafters to fall silent to the floor. Still, one name speaks louder than the other ghosts in his head. One grief haunts the space between his thoughts. One voice rings in his head as he looks after Varric. The dwarf’s silhouette is deceptively slight against the vast wastes, broad shoulders drawn together, emotion held in-check between them.

“Someone ought to speak with him,” Solas says, rising to his full height, “before our silence on the matter becomes misconstrued as callous disregard.”

“Hey, nice of you to volunteer, Solas.” He checks his shoulder, using only an ounce of his strength, but it sends Solas stumbling forward nevertheless. The look of reproachful surprise is knocked off his face, but the expression that follows is no more amused. 

“Go on, don’t be like that,” Iron Bull urges. “It’s not like you can make it worse.”

Spoken by a man who clearly has no concept of Solas’ history for worsening bad situations. 

Another glance Varric’s way cements his decision, however. 

“Very well,” he concedes, pushing himself up off his knees and dashing the sand from the insides of his fingers. In the wake of Wisdom’s loss there had been no shortage of sympathy. Though Varric’s voice had not been among that chorus, he deserves no less support.

The time it takes to reach Varric is shorter than he would like, too brief to think of any meaningful words of comfort. He suspects no distance would suffice, but before he has the chance to try the dwarf’s voice cuts in first:

“If you’re here to express your condolences, I don’t want to hear them.” There’s a bitter twang to his voice, a venom he typically reserves for the Seeker at her most disagreeable. “I had my fill of ‘sorry’s’ when Bartrand died,” he snorts, “mostly from people who’d’ve been glad to poke a dagger in him just to make sure it stuck.”

“Hawke seemed to have no shortage of enemies herself.”

“More than she ever knew what to do with. Difference was that most were for the right reasons.” Whatever humour had crept into his expression vanishes in an instant, voice trailing away as he realises what tense he’d referred to her in. “Shit…” He peels the glove off his right hand to pinch the tears that prick his eyes.

Solas feels a twinge of sympathy in his gut, but manages to withhold himself from saying the platitudes that Varric holds in such low regard. “If you don’t wish to hear my condolences, then I will refrain,” he says, “but I have mourned enough friends alone to know it is better done with company.”

Varric’s silence is damning, and in the absence of the Veil the difference between grief and anger is razor thin. He holds a moment, rooted in the sand, and in the silence he hears his mouth click open. “These friends you’ve lost, were any of them real?” The way Varric poses the question sounds like an accusation.

“You mean to ask if they were spirits?” he asks, restrained. “Some. Not all.”

“Right.” The skepticism in Varric’s voice is palpable. “Something tells me Hawke’s not going to regenerate, or whatever it is spirits do.”

“And neither will Wisdom. Should anything or anyone be reborn from its ashes, it will only be because the mark it left upon the world was too potent to be forgotten. I suspect, in some regard, the same could be said of Hawke.” Finally he sits, settling beside Varric with legs drawn beneath him in a meditative pose. “Are there any tales you’ve left to tell? It may help to share them now.”

“No, I’m— I think I’ve told enough stories. Maybe if I’d told a few less, she’d still be here.” The thought haunts his expression, hand drawing over his mouth to disguise the grief tucked in its corners. “Tell me one about your friend. If she— it— if you choose friends like I do, there must be some worth telling.”

The suggestion peaks his brow, surprise tempered by the fond smile Wisdom’s memories invoke. “Enough to keep you here ‘til dawn.”

“Well, I’m listening.” He leans his chin into his hand, fingers like a cage guarding the shape of his mouth.

The gaze he casts the dwarf’s way is laden with skepticism, expecting any moment for the offer to be withdrawn. When it isn’t, he looks down into his lap and asks himself which warranted telling first, how to dilute centuries of life into a single story. Remembering, and remembering well, is a sacred act, as deliberate as the lines of paint upon the rotunda walls. He begins, haltingly, at first, before the words begin to flow:

“It is easy to hear the word ‘wisdom’ and picture scholars locked in rooms with more books than they could ever hope to read, but in truth it had little interest in the wisdom of those who did not see fit to share it. Such excess was better suited for spirits of Greed or Envy. I first met it in the wilderness, teaching itself how the grass grows from the first seeds of spring, but it greeted me as an old friend and told me it had known me before I, it. It was only when I came with an open mind and a willing ear that we could know each other at last.”

He was never a god in its eyes, always Solas, always himself. It recognised him when he could not. Remembering Wisdom aches, like pressure on an injured leg, and he pulls a slow breath through his nose before he continues.

“It preferred watching to intervention, often saying wisdom was two-thirds observation, but circumstance forced its hand on more than one occasion.” Its words still echo in the skulls of the freed, rattling as the blood was peeled from their faces. “In dreams it came upon an apostate trying to eke out a life in a humble Ferelden village, the sort of place where rumours took like fire to an August field.” 

“It saw her fears: prying questions of how she stoked the fires so quickly, or why her mother never taught her how to darn her socks. With a steady hand it reached out and taught her, so that the next time the barman looked too closely when she tended to the fireplace he would see only trembling hands striking at a flint. It filled her head with affirmations that she knew more today than she had ever known in her life, that it was more than she would ever know in the Circle, where knowledge could be kept behind lock and key.”

Varric moves his hand from his mouth, the corner of his eyes clearer than they’d been moments ago. “Put like that, it sounds like it was always as much Pride as it was Wisdom.”

Solas spares the dwarf the grim expression that steals onto his face, turning instead to the sky, where tendrils from the Breach snake across the heavens. “It is no coincidence that it was Pride we found waiting for us that day. Wisdom was the captive, and Pride the rebel, willing to tear itself apart fighting for the freedom it was owed.”

Struck speechless, the typically mouthy dwarf sucks in a breath. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

To his surprise, and Varric’s, he laughs. “I thought we had agreed to skip platitudes.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes there’s not much else to say. You have to find something to fill that silence, even if it’s just empty words.”

“Just because we have heard them before does not mean they are empty.” He thinks of every ‘I love you’ he has uttered in his life, and every time it went unsaid. “I am sorry for your loss, as well, but if you will permit me a second story, I believe I have another to tell.”

When Varric agrees, he does not hesitate to begin again.

“In the Fade I bore witness to an elf, a mage, fleeing Chantry forces. With Templars hot on his trail and the walls of Amaranthine too high to scale without notice, he had little recourse but to find refuge in a farmer’s wagon and hope to pass for the first autumn harvest. The light of his phylactery glowed like a star in his pursuer’s hand; it was only a matter of time ‘til he would be found— had a woman not stopped them.” 

“Her voice high with fear, she pointed to the outer walls, claiming she’d seen a man cavorting with spirits in an alleyway. Cursing their trinket, the knights hurried in the direction of her finger, chainmail clattering with every stride. As the commotion cleared, the woman’s lips turned up in a devilish grin, a cheerful tune on her lips as she went on with her day as though nothing had happened. The apostate was on the next ship north, safely nestled amongst the harvest. He kept the woman in his prayers, even if he never learned her name.”

Beside him, Varric’s shoulders shook with grief, sobs soft enough that they do not overpower the story’s end. “Hawke was a hero long before anyone, even you, thought to tell her story. Mourn her, share your grief as you shared your lives, but know her tale does not end at Adamant just as Andraste’s did not end in Minrathous. Take pride in the moments she chose to share with you; they will bring you comfort in the days to come, even if remembering moves you to tears.”

“Thanks, Solas.” He swipes his sleeve under his nose, and Solas pretends he does not see the gleam of tears in his eyes as they meet. “Say, have I ever told you about the time we broke into Château Haine?”