#storiesofthedas2

Masks upon masks. The Winter Palace is strange to Cole, who attends at the Inquisitor's bidding and finds himself at a loss for how to help. Solas comes upon him with ideas for how to cope with the deadly Game.

Read on AO3.

Couples spin on the dance floor, turning and turning, going nowhere and everywhere at once. Their heads fill with daydreams, one gazes into her partner’s eyes through their masks, imagining the hidden corners they could lose themselves in. Another, all he sees is the faint outline of a knife in his companion’s skirts, so all-consuming he almost forgets the steps. A third, their eyes bore holes into the other’s heads, hate springs from love eternal. His eyes dart from one couple to the next, glimpses into minds fraught with thoughts of a Game no one ever really wins.

He breathes in and feels the air catch in his throat. Honeyed words mask the taste of poison, cold compassion, they understand only so they can hurt. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, it isn’t–

In the blink of an eye he’s in the library, surrounded by pages that whisper the words of yesterday. Not so sharp against his skin. Below, a dead man in the shape of a Warden pretends to stare at a plaque, praying no one will look at him twice, fearing they might see his valourous wings are clipped. It’s still a hurt, a tangle, but he’s trying to help. Cruelty does not become him. He lets out a breath he forgot he was holding, hands coming together to pull at his sleeves.

Oh.

He had forgotten about the uniform. The fabric doesn’t come away at his touch, no matter how hard he tugs.

And he misses his hat.

Cole wonders how long he will wait here, alone with his panic clawing at his throat. In the Spire he spent months isolated, forgotten by all save the one who no longer cares to know him. Suddenly the soft, inviting lights which illuminate the halls of the Winter Palace seem as cold as the dark cells they had kept Rhys in, clapped in irons for crimes Cole committed. Anxiety squeezes every inch of him. He counts the beats of the music that drifts from the distant dance hall, just to assure himself only minutes have passed since he came here.

A door opens behind him, and he nearly jumps into shadow, the Veil waiting to envelop him, drawing him from prying eyes, but a familiar face waits on the other side. “Solas!” he gasps, relieved and ashamed that he had doubted, but grateful most of all.

Solas shuts the door behind him, turning the handle so the latch doesn’t make a sound. “I thought I might find you here.”

That gives Cole pause. He hadn’t known he would find himself here, until it happened. “But I don’t read.” The books here are newer than those kept in the Pit, some hum with the occult, others recount poems about the shape of a woman’s hips, but he still doesn’t read. There isn’t a question in his tone, but Solas hears it, all the same.

“This place can be overwhelming for anyone, even without accounting for your abilities. Books carry meaning, but without eyes upon them those meanings are static. Far easier to take in,” he answers as he walks towards him, gait stiffer than usual. His feet had forgotten what it was like to wear shoes. Solas has been quiet that evening, quieter than usual, the stem of a glass glued between his fingers, bottomless. He lets his hat do his talking for him, the Drasca’s dissent lived on atop his head. He stops beside Cole, leaning upon the marble rail, gloved hands bearing weight. His eyes turn upon him, no brimmed hat to hide behind. “Are you all right?”

He pulls on his sleeves, this time he thinks he feels a thread come loose. “Yes... No? There are two faces for every person.” The Left Hand smiles and laughs, she comes alive, but inside it’s cold and cruel. The rose withers upon the vine. He finds the thread with his finger and pulls, but it doesn’t break. It unravels, further and further, if he keeps going his whole sleeve will be an unspooled mess on the floor. “I don’t know which to look at. I-I don’t know how to help.”

Solas reaches out, subduing his worrying hands with a single, steady touch. A gentle gesture, despite the blood which stains them. Sometimes they do not seem so different from his own, they remember the bodies because forgetting would be worse. Killer’s hands, but there is no deceit in their tenderness. Solas wraps the thread around his finger, string bright white against his brown glove, and he tugs. It snaps, suddenly brittle, and falls to the floor to be swept away by a servant who will never know they were here. A comforting hand is placed deliberately on his shoulder blade, and Cole stills. He inhales, eyes snapping from the abandoned thread to Solas. There is kindness in his eyes, quiet assurance. He has seen this all before and he will make it easier to bear. So many tricks just to make it through a day, an evening, an hour. “You will not find much compassion in these affairs, any help you offer will be perceived as duplicitous, a means to get what it is you desire.”

“Then I… shouldn’t help?”

He hesitates, delaying his answer with a moment’s deliberation. “The choice is ultimately yours, but their comfort should not come at the cost of your peace of mind.” His hand slowly falls from his back as Cole turns his advice around in his head. “While we are waiting for the Inquisitor to call upon us, rather than mend the missing pieces in strangers’ lives, perhaps I may help you.”

“Help me?” He searches Solas’ eyes for answers, compassion seeking solace in pride. They are quiet, revealing only as much as intended. Cole chips at the cracks in the rock and hopes for water to spring forth, but he guards his sorrows like a wolf guards her den.

“Would you care to learn how to dance?”

A dozen thoughts pile into the spirit’s head, most too quick to catch, but he grasps one by the tail. “Do spirits dance?”

Solas claims spirits are people, and each day that belief is realer in Cole’s own mind, reinforced by the Herald and Solas himself. He need not change to be loved, or understood, he need only be himself. But if he is a person, then he is not a person the way Varric is, or Cassandra, or even Solas. There’s a touch of sadness in the corner of his smile, as though he is sorry the question needs to be asked. “I suppose it falls to us to answer together,” he replies patiently with an offered palm.

Uncertain how it will help, but ready to trust that it can, he takes Solas’ hand.

“Listen closely,” he says, but he declines to speak again. Cole’s instruction takes a different turn, a manicured glimpse through a window into Solas’ soul.

“Delicate hand folded like a paper crane between my shoulders, her eyes shine like the gold she deals in when I take to the dance.” Josephine had poured so much into tonight, all her smiles and favours, anything that will see the Inquisition prevail. “She didn’t think you would be asked to dance, but she was afraid if you didn’t learn, someone would.”

“Her time was likely better spent elsewhere,” he agrees, “though nothing would have given me more pleasure tonight than refusing one of Celene’s court. Listen again, parse the thoughts which cloud the memory and see how we move.” Cole nods, and concentrates. He remembers the palm tucked in the valley between Solas’ shoulders, and he moves his there. His feet, too, he moves in line with his hips. It’s strange, focusing upon his own body and the space it takes up in the world. Lighter now that he has chosen compassion, but still very much real, empty only in the seconds the air rushes from the chambers of his lungs.

He feels eyes upon him, questioning, searching for confirmation before the music dares move them. “I’m ready.”

When Solas steps forward, Cole steps back, like they’re two puppets on the same musical string. He clips his strides, travelling farther faster than Solas can hope to without magic to carry him there. Awkward at first, but with each beat he feels him join with the dance that exists in his head. Old melodies, half-remembered, play in distant memories. Like the sky he knew it, once, but made himself forget. Dancing wasn’t always this way, was it?

Solas remembers. Feet too full of motion to keep his thoughts safe in his head, they spill onto the fabric of the world where Cole breathes them like his own. Memories of moving on a dancefloor to a familiar tune, swaying with the stars themselves, spinning until they parted from the earth. He swells with pride, a beast alive beneath his ribcage, it thrives and fights and inspires. When they dance the heavens and the earth move, and an empire holds its breath. It fears what dread the dawn will bring, but his People find freedom in the impromptu steps.

“What are you two doing here?” A voice snaps the string. Halamshiral looks different than it did heartbeats ago, all the magic hidden in dark corners (all the elves, too). When Cole turns to see the servant who disturbed them, he’s surprised to see a bare face behind her plain mask, and a second later cannot recall why.

With silver eyes she stares at him, unblinking. “She can see me.”

“A consequence of our dance, I believe.” Yes, he can feel it. Solas fades with each passing second, growing distant as his hand falls from his waist. “It will fade in a moment.” He speaks as though she is not there, but he’s waiting. It’s another dance, only it’s Cole’s turn to lead.

Cut loose, he turns his attention to the woman. Fear flows through her veins, the dagger beneath her sleeve is ready to open theirs. Beneath the steel, her heart wavers. Stranded between duty and love. “I’m warning you-”

“There’s still time,” he says. “She waits for you beside the fountain where you wished away Your Lady’s collection.” There were wiser things to do with gold, but oh how they’d laughed with every dream plunged into the water.

Cole steps forward and she braces, but not fast enough. “Forget.”

Time is unmade behind her eyes, and she slips the mask from her face to rub the last place she’d been kissed. Gone as quickly as she came, with new purpose in her step.

“It seems you found a way to help someone, after all,” Solas remarks after the library door has shut behind her. “You never fail to impress.”

Something in him shines brighter, bolstered by his pride. “Thank you.” He falters, looking down at his feet, curling his toes inside their boots. “I’d like to try another dance, if you think there’s time.”

A laugh coloured wine red parts Solas’ lips, punctuated by a snort that makes Blackwall down below look around for its source. “I believe there is time for one more,” he says, outstretched palm seeking Cole’s hand. “Since you have devised a way to put off intruders, I daresay we have all the time in the world.”

Day 8: Shirt Words: 288 Character: Jamor Lavellan

A cheesy, dumb, self indulgent Pavellan scribble for y’all ^-^

Prompt(s): Shooting stars & Flowers.

One moment the heavens are silent, stars suspended in the sky overhead exactly as they had been the first night Gorim saw them. The next, a streak dashes through a cluster of stars and he jumps up in his bedroll, grasping for a sword that isn’t at his side. It is gone as quickly as it appeared, vanishing into the darkness as though it was never there. “Ancestor’s mercy,” he sighs, chest heaving from withheld breath. “Just when you grow used to all those— things up there, they start moving.”

Tamar pauses mid-way through loosening her braid to look up with him, sweeping the skies with curious eyes. “They’re always moving,” she says as she settles down beside him, feet tucking neatly beneath her. A warden in name but a princess by birth, he doubts any amount of time on the surface can hope to hammer the noble out of her. “Most, to my understanding, are too slow to see.”

“Is that so?” He searches the spot where it had fallen to see what was left behind. Finding nothing, his attention turns to Tamar’s half-undone braids, threading his fingers through the places where her hair still wove together. “I suppose I’ve never looked close enough to notice.” Even after all these months he tries to avoid looking when he can help it. At night it isn’t so intimidating, he can almost fool himself into believing he’s looking up at the tall ceilings of the untamed tunnels past the rune-lit Deep Roads, and then looking up doesn’t feel so much like falling.

Tamar lays her cheek against him, hair spilling over his shoulder. “They move like the sun in the sky, from east to west, sometimes vanishing beneath the horizon for months at a time.”

Gorim wonders (but does not ask) if that makes the sun just another star in the sky, just one in a million, and if that is the case, he wonders what that makes them. “Where did you learn about this?” His attention turns, eyes moving to their corners in time to see her cheeks redden. The shade of pink they turn tells him all he needs to know. Their answer waits on a shelf back in Orzammar, tucked out of sight where lordly eyes will never look.

“Do you remember that book I read a year ago? By the Summer Skies?”

The name stirs vague memories, words on pages describing humans making prolonged eye contact across a crowded ballroom, or maybe that was the one that came after the one she means. Or before. Only the best and worst the humans have to offer sticks out in his mind, everything else lost in a cloud of wistful stares and heaving bosoms. “I can’t say I do.”

“They swore if they were ever separated they’d meet under the Maiden’s crown. Each night another star appeared in the night sky until the constellation was whole again.”

“Constellation?”

“A group of stars that together make a picture. Like—” She sits up to scan the heavens, tongue pushing to the side of her cheek before she finds one she recognises. “There.” Arm extended, she traces a line through a cluster of stars. Despite his best efforts, he fails to recognise the shape she’s making. “That’s Draconis up there. By springtime it will have disappeared entirely behind the horizon.”

“And it’s supposed to be the shape of a dragon?” He tilts his head to one side, examining the trail of stars he thinks are meant to be webbed wings extended to both sides of its torso. The resemblance is slight, as a child’s drawing might be, though he’s yet to see a dragon on the Surface near enough to say with certainty.

“With a little imagination.”

“Ah, I see.” He pulls her against him, anchoring his hand on her waist, considering the sky with a different question in mind. “And which stars should be ours? Those?” He gestures towards a smattering of stars hanging over the distant Frostbacks. Towards home, he thinks.

“I don’t think that’s a constellation.”

“Not yet, but surely the ones the humans have now had to start a similar way.” Gorim squints his eyes, blurring the stars between his lashes, hoping he can make a shape from the collection he’d chosen. The thin line that formed the base could be a tail, or a handle, he sees the outline of a mace and muses to himself that his warrior’s blood hasn’t abandoned him yet. Unsatisfied, he looks again, thumb playing beneath the hem of her shirt as he tries different shapes: a scepter, a ladle, a— “A flower.”

It seems trite, but her smile against his shoulder tells him he’s on the right path. “Like the bouquet you smuggled into my room.”

He knows just the one she means. A humble bouquet of bright red flowers with broad, round leaves that had been more trouble than he could’ve ever imagined. “Those flowers,” Gorim chuckles, “they nearly tore the Assembly apart.”

“Most were only sore they didn’t think of it first,” she says. “Nothing they’d tried worked half as well.”

“I never told you this, but when I first left Orzammar, those flowers were one of the first things I saw.” Remembering brings a humorous tear to his eye, which he wipes away with the tip of a finger. “My first thought was that it had to be a sign, a sign that I would see you again. I’m not sure the ancestors send signs above ground, but if they did, I reasoned that they were probably the sort that grew out of it. My second thought was: that sodding merchant charged me that much for some weeds he picked off the side of the road?”

Tamar snorts against his shoulder, grin tempered by how she pushes it into the sleeve of his shirt. “Weeds or not, he picked them well. They were beautiful, even when they started wilting.”

“I was afraid you’d never throw them away.”

“I haven’t. One’s still pressed between the pages of a book somewhere, but if Bhelen ever finds it….” When she lapses into silence, it’s less warm than before. A slow sigh issues from her nose as she sits a little closer against him, nose pressing against his neck so every breath tickles his skin.

Day 13: Kids Character: Jamor Lavellan

A/N: Skipped day 12, also this is very shit and is meant to be a few years or so after Trespasser, idk when tho dkhdjf sorry

The two had been holding hands and walking around the gardens for some time in comfortable silence. Dorian looked over to Lavellan’s face and smiled. He was too afraid to voice it, but for the past few months he had been imagining what Jamor would be like as a father. Things were slowly improving not just in Tevinter, but in all of Thedas. An elven mage and a magister might be able to start a family in the near future, a notion neither of them had ever expected to consider.

He had seen Jamor with children before, and he seemed to have a natural affinity with them, so nurturing and patient. In those moments, it was hard to believe that this was the same man who had sealed a hole in the sky and defeated an ancient, dragon-wielding magister.

3. Seducer (Read on AO3) Solas x nb!Lavellan

“Hold still.” Ian’s voice is wreathed with mirth, laughter lacing his command as he corners Solas in the entrance of their room. “My hands are cold.” Fingers slip between sweater and shirt, splaying across his stomach. A surprised laugh moves him, skin prickling pleasantly at the line drawn beneath his ribcage, traced with one cool finger.

“Curious,” he hums, “they don’t feel cold.”

Day 2: Shiny Character: Nym Surana 

Day 9: Wolf  Words: 268 Character: Jamor Lavellan 

(Trespasser spoilers!!)

1. Campfire. (Read on AO3)

“I’ve got a story.”

The campfire flares as though in response, casting the small circle of companions in orange light as the Herald leans forward, bracing herself on her knees. Her eyes sweep across the faces of the people she’d come to know so well so quickly, a self-satisfied grin steals across her expression as she notes how they all turn to listen. Those who’d busied themselves with their hands paused their work, looking across the fire to where Thora sits. It’s a new feeling for the dwarf, who had learned long ago that the closer you are to the ground the less likely they are to listen. She lets the prelude hang pregnant in the air, cutting through the atmosphere mired in tales. Some real, some legends, all with a touch of fantasy that made one question which were which. When the time’s right, she sits up a little straighter, feigning hesitancy. “Though I’m not sure any of you’d believe me if I told it.” “Stop playin’ and tell us already,” Sera moans. “Before Varric tells another.” The man in question laughs. “Come to think of it, there was that Pride demon in Darktown.” With a dramatic groan, Sera throws boot over his head, only encouraging his laughter. When at last contains himself, he throws an apologetic look Thora’s way, grin still creasing the corners of his eyes. “We’re all ears, Sunflower.”

She’s biting back a grin, herself, struggling to contain herself for the sake of the mood. “Alright,” she begins, collecting herself. “This was in Ferelden, Amaranthine, in the days not long after the Blight. Ferelden was a strange place to be in those days, the memories from the Blight still hung heavy over its people, but there was hope, too. All the more since the Hero of Ferelden had chosen to make the arling her home.” She’d worried for a time if operating so close to a new Warden stronghold was wise, but as it turned out Wardens needed lyrium, too, and even after they’d saved the world official channels were still reluctant to relinquish any power. That’s where the Carta steps in. Same was true of the Conclave. A finger in every pie, that was the Carta motto, sometimes two if things seemed especially promising. “Good thing she did, too, or I’m not sure I’d have made it out of Amaranthine alive.”

Thora rocks back in her seat, eyes sweeping across the faces of her companions, wondering to herself if this is how the Hero felt during those days in Ferelden. Retiring to a well-lit campfire, surrounded by the strangest collection of people Thedas had to offer.

“It was in the weeks after the Darkspawn sieged Amaranthine that it happened. Cool Harvestmere evening, not so different from this one, when a stranger approached our camp. He had a hood on, threadbare, pulled all the way over his face so all we could see was the shadow cast by the fire. He asked for a bit of shelter from the road, and I couldn’t see a reason to refuse him.”

A disbelieving snort shoots from Varric’s nose. “Let me get this straight,” he says. “A mysterious stranger oozes from the shadows asking for a place at your fire and you just… let him?”

“My mama taught me the meaning of the word ‘hospitality,’ Master Tethras.”

Varric breathes a sigh, though he can’t fight his amusement anymore now than he could before. “I suppose it explains the company you keep.”

“Mhm, now, as I was saying.” She doesn’t continue right away, trying to seize her train of thought where it had left her behind. “He asked for shelter, and we let him. We’d… lost someone escaping Amaranthine, and had a bedroll to spare. It only seemed right. He was polite, a little odd, we taught him how to play Diamondback with only a half-deck of cards, never saw a man so happy to win a couple coppers, but times were hard enough I couldn’t say I was surprised.” Thora recalls how he fumbled them between his fingers like he was unaccustomed to the sensation of his fingers in thick leather gloves, after he put them away he kept patting his pocket just to make sure he could still feel the impression of them in his coat. “He thanked us before bed, and by morning he was gone. Not too out of the ordinary, most people have business on the roads. Only I noticed the grass where he’d pitched his tent had wilted overnight, like winter came early. In the weeks that followed we heard rumours, talk of Darkspawn who spoke King’s Tongue, and a friendly stranger who seemed to always precede a sudden breakout of the Blight.”

As she finishes her tale, a quiet settles over the camp. Varric’s face had grown paler in the telling, the dwarf uncharacteristically silent as he avoided her eye.

“Intriguing,” Solas says, “that is, of course, assuming it is true.”