#weptfire

god… the short of it is that externally it doesn’t impact him much at all, but internally it impacts him a hell of a lot. the reconciliation with his father is more like closure for dorian in a lot of ways, i think. it’s very much a painful conversation to air grievances and to try to get halward fucking pavus to hear him out for once in his life ——— it doesn’t quite go to plan, obviously, but i think the knowledge that he said his piece and got some stuff in return as well as something like an apology for what his father did to him… it settles dorian, in some ways. gentles something that’s biting at the bit inside of him, screaming and screaming and screaming to be heard underneath all of his deeply internalized pain.

in my opinion, “reconciling” with his father helps dorian let go of some of his anger and a very small measure of his pain. the wound is still bleeding, and will bleed forevermore, but it’s easier to breathe with the knowledge that his father, at least, regrets the extreme nature of his actions. dorian will never truly forgive his father ( or his mother ) regardless of the status of their relationship, but in some ways it makes it easier to accept that he loves him no matter what. because he’s his father.

also, it makes everything that comes shortly thereafter less… jarring overall. his father’s death, the sure knowledge that halward did it to save dorian in some ways, him getting his seat in the magisterium. it’s all difficult, with a dorian who speaks to halward properly for the first time, probably, in his entire goddamn life. but it’s less out of left field. he grieves for his father, in this case, and feels anger for those who killed him and anger with his father for leaving him with nothing more than a letter and this terrible responsibility and anger with his mother ——— but he grieves, properly. and accepts his mantle as lord magister pavus.

but for dorian when he doesn’t “reconcile” with his father? there’s so much anger. there’s so much anger and hurt and rage and a wound that’s bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and he’s hemorrhaging, he’s going to die form the pain and the lack of closure and the knowledge that he loves this man who despises him and, for all that he knows, never regretted his terrible actions for a moment ——— that’s being dramatic, of course. the he’s going to die. it’s just, dorian’s less ( relatively ) at peace with himself if he doesn’t at least speak to his father. for all that we know, dorian never speaks to halward ever again, if you don’t encourage him to reconcile and instead insist he leaves.

this isn’t to say that telling dorian not to give his father the time of day is a necessarily bad idea, or diminishes his chances to a happy ending ——— it’s more that it will forever leave a what if in his head. that he never gets closure. that he never gets answers.

and when his father dies? when he gets that letter? when he gets that seat? he grieves, yes. but he’s so angry. he’s fucking furious at his father, for never speaking to him about these things, for never giving him the time of day, for never APOLOGIZING, or even trying to. and still leaving him as his heir, with this terrible responsibility ——— there’s more confusion, and conflict, and anger to weigh down his grief over his father’s death. there’s less acceptance about his new position, about his new life, but he still accepts it because he has to. there’s just, also, a good amount of rage.

dorian thinks his father a coward regardless of everything, i think. he thinks of him as far more of a coward and in a far less flattering light if he doesn’t “reconcile,” of course, but he loves him no matter what, something that i’ve spoken about at length and how much conflict dorian feels that he loves his parents despite everything they’ve done to him.

tl;dr it really does impact quite a bit if only because halward always dies in the end and whether or nor dorian ever truly gets to say his piece… and know that halward regrets his actions to some extent from his own mouth rather than through a letter… it just. changes some things, i think.

“Madame Vivienne, First Enchanter of the Circle of Magi, Enchanter of the Imperial Court, Mistress of the Duke of Ghislain.”

The faintest of smiles curves her lips as they call her name, its shape half-obscured by the mask’s shadow (the one adornment she had allowed herself-- she would hardly be Madame de Fer without it). Celene stands waiting, framed by an open door. A mask is fitted over the bridge of her nose, its eyes cut thin enough that no one can see the bags that lie beneath.

Not that she is being critical, of course. These are trying times.

“Your Majesty,” she says, curtsying towards her. “I come bearing gifts.”

On cue, the sound of two pairs of heels shuffle through the door behind her, each servant carrying a box wrapped in neat paper. Gossip about Empress Celene’s new enchanter had not failed to reach Vivienne’s ear, but she will not let her pride harm her cause. Now, more than ever, it is vital she demonstrates the importance of a Circle’s education.

send me meta | accepting

It’s difficult to pin down one “most” because of how much the Veil changed every aspect of his life. So really, you could say he misses a Veil-less world the most, but that wasn’t a product of Elvhenan, just the way the world was. Before Elvhenan it was the same, but it’s undoubtedly what he misses the most about life before. It has a huge ripple effect, changing Solas’s experience with food, art (of all varieties), nature, personal relationships, and how he perceived the world. Magic is a sixth sense of a sort, and while it isn’t gone now, it’s… less. While I write Solas as always having struggled with depersonalisation/derealisation at different points in his life, the Veil ramped it up to a point that it takes over a year for anything to start seeming real.

Even when he does learn to cope, he still is constantly confronted with how different everything is. When he kisses Ian for the first few times he’s concerned about Ian’s enjoyment– before, the world would’ve changed around them to reflect how they felt. Now, he certainly feels his own world change, but he’s keenly aware it’s his own perspective alone, and he has only a few cues to work off rather than the whole host of ones he was used to. I’ve written before about how the Orlesian line “tastes of despair” doesn’t sound so ridiculous to Solas, at least until he tries it. The old line “made with love” was a bit more literal in Elvhenan. It’s mentioned in World of Thedas that Solas doesn’t eat that much, and I honestly think this is one reason why. The other reason being that skilled Dreamers don’t actually need to eat, they can derive sustenance entirely from the Fade. I tend to hc that my Solas eats more than is implied in WoT, but when he does it’s usually because it’s a food he really enjoys (dessert, also any main course with honey as a main ingredient god help him), it’s made by someone he likes (eventually I think he develops a small friendship with sb who works in the kitchen and he tends to eat what he makes), or someone noticed his eating habits and eating will get them off his back.

This was all one very long tangent but I felt it was necessary to set up how much the Veil effects what he misses. I miss the cold North Sea and the English countryside, but if I decide I’m going to make some Yorkshire pudding or order some Quavers from England the way I consume them won’t be fundamentally changed.

Solas has always missed the people most, and it started before the creation of the Veil. When he was Fen’Harel, a rebel, a traitor, who only returned to the cities of Elvhenan as their enemy. Becoming Fen’Harel meant turning the hearts of many of the people he knew against him. While destruction of art was part of the rebellion’s deal, it limited itself for the most part to art that adulated the evanuris, and he could reassure himself that whatever he missed most would either a) survive or b) something new and better would take its place, something not rooted in a society that suppressed a thousand low-born artists for the benefit of one lucky-born artist. He also missed the food, while he’ll say himself some of the best food he’s ever eaten was with the rebellion, he still missed the bakeries in Arlathan and kept their recipes (as best as he remembers them) close.

But the people were always who he missed the most. As an evanuris, he had issues forming close, emotionally intimate relationships with people due to the huge gap there is between “god” and even the highest non-divine title, but he still grew fond of people. He knew them well enough to know most didn’t deserve what the rebellion was preparing to do to their cities, and that it was ultimately the system and the people in power who were their enemy rather than the ordinary people of Elvhenan. It was tempered by the fact that I hc there were members of the rebellion he was close to, closer in many ways than he was to anyone else before his defection as he had been growing more withdrawn with every new doubt. Yet that didn’t erase the fact that he missed the people he knew before, nor the despair he felt knowing their lives and livelihoods were at risk.

The same is still ultimately true now– the people are who he misses. When you ask Solas to share what he has seen in the Fade he always tells you human (for lack of a better word) stories, their experiences are what he connects with more than other aspects of the culture they came from. When you ask him about Elvhenan he does admittedly talk about buildings and magic rather than people, but I tend to chalk that up as it being wiser to not talk about the people he knew even in vague, distant terms for fear of seeming too fond although if he trusts/likes someone he may tell them some stories, but always with enough details left out that it can be interpreted as taking place in his apparent lifetime.

So like??? Even now, the people. That’s ultimately why he’s still doing this, more than for crystal spires or pickled apples or any magic lost with the Veil. The Veil did more than destroy Elvhenan, and its harm to his people isn’t just in the past when you take into consideration that spirits are his people as much as people like Abelas. He misses them most, but also feels he can’t talk about them.

As for what he sees through rose-coloured lens, Mythal is probably the biggest one. He calls her the best of them, and I honestly don’t doubt that she is, but he still harbours a lot of affection for her yet at the end of the day we come across her temple full of elves wearing her vallaslin. She was a strange presence on his life, a positive and negative one, but I think Solas is most likely to only remember the good.

There are smaller things he might romanticise himself which other people may not get. Not everyone might understand why he misses being moved to tears by a meal, but it seems cultural in Elvhenan, so I can’t quite say it’s rose-coloured. I think he might see the art through rose-tinted lens, especially early on in his time in the Dragon Age, but again his perception is so fucked it’s hard to blame him. That and it also applies to his own art so? Overall though I think he has a fairly realistic memory of Elvhenan, best demonstrated in this dialogue with Dorian:

Solas: Empires rise and fall. Arlathan was no more “innocent” than your own Tevinter in its time.Solas: Your nostalgia for the ancient elves, however romanticized, is pointless.

holly i would die for you.

to preface this, i want to note that i’ve only read the picture of dorian gray once before, though that was a little less than a year ago, so hopefully i’m not too far off. also, i’ll be referring to the literary character as gray, to minimize any confusion lmao.

i have considered the similarities and differences between the pair of them, given their shared names and the fact that oscar wilde, whose writing i attribute to dorian fairly extensively, wrote the book. admittedly, at first glance, i placed far more differences between them than similarities, but upon reconsideration i think that there are a plethora of parallels that can be feasibly drawn.

first, let’s consider the obvious similarity : their vanity. the entirety of the novel centers around gray’s vanity at its core. dorian’s vanity is one of his traits that people notice the most, beyond his blatant mage-y tendencies, and therefore judge him on ——— he finds himself beautiful and boasts it as one of his finer traits, as gray does, as well. people in general find them beautiful / attractive / what have you in their respective universes, which leads to shallow infatuation and so on and so forth.

of course, in wilde’s novel, gray is seduced into a hedonistic lifestyle that spirals into an obsessive and destructive level of self-interest, leading to the deaths of many, as well as his own. all in all : a gleefully grim tale about the ruination debauchery can bring. dorian… never quite reached that level. because of the alexius family.

now, i’m not saying that being gay is morally corrupt ——— of course not. nor is wanting to live a life that is true to yourself. what i’m saying is that, while he wasn’t drawn towards further vanity and “moral corruption” by a lord henry figure, endorsing a hedonistic lifestyle with such zeal that he draws an impressionable and beautiful young man into it, he certainly began to descend into a similar state that gray did. carelessness and recklessness and SELF-PERCEIVED SELFISHNESS. gray was doubtlessly selfish. dorian, as i’ve mentioned before, thought that he was ultimately selfish for simply wanting to BE HAPPY.

similar, but not the same.

gray was motivated by the desire to be happy for the rest of his life via his eternal youth, because what use is there in living if not for beauty? dorian was motivated by the desire to be happy for the rest of his life via being himself truly, because what use is there in living if you’re simply going to be utterly miserable?

most of us know and i’ve spoken at length about the “breakdown” that dorian had in his late teens, as i generally call it. when living the perfect life that his parents had predetermined for him at his conception began to weigh heavily upon him, crushing him, destroying him from the inside, out. something inside of him finally “broke,” so to speak, and he quickly descended into his own debauchery and hedonism. in other words : drinking in excess and pursuing sex in a frankly reckless fashion.

i term this portion of his life in my narrative of it on my doc the egocentric self-immolation for a reason, after all.

if g.ereon a.lexius hadn’t found him, what would’ve become of dorian? oh, perhaps he would have dragged himself out of the lake of liquor he had drowned himself in. perhaps he would have become something like the man he is that you know and see today. perhaps.

far more likely is that he would have continued on the path of absolute self destruction with a near-obsessive zeal and his parents would have sent family retainers for him and he would have fought and fought and fought and ——— given in, in the end. or be killed by their hands. either one, really.

and either, truly : is the death of dorian.

also i want to take a moment to consider the name of the man who painted the beautiful portrait of gray to begin with : basil hallward. funny, isn’t it? how h.alward pavus, in some ways, created dorian ——— only to be disgusted by him, in the end. a beautiful parallel, isn’t it? shame he doesn’t die. ( i jest, of course, but i found that utterly wonderful )

anyways i hope that this made some measure of sense because i’m just rambling as per usual but the parallels… or the near parallels, i suppose, are something to consider. that dorian easily could’ve been gray, or an image of gray, if it weren’t for the fact that he was found. though it’s also important to remember, that dorian is vain, but he isn’t quite so cruel as gray : he simply thinks he is, sometimes.

send me meta | accepting

solas has tried most things once - a natural result of living as long as he has. painting is certainly his greatest talent and the one he has the patience for practising, compared to other creative endeavours which he dabbles in rather than committing to it.

the primary hobby he only has “in part” is musical ability. before the war that created the evanuris he learned how to play a string instrument (the closest equivalent would be the cello) and later learned how to play the flute for the benefit of miolvun, joly’s oc and one of his oldest friends. mio is a harpist and so he learned mostly to engage in their interest and play with them. he loves playing, but he’s no great talent and he hasn’t played since before the veil. it’s something he could probably pick up again as from his perspective the time that’s passed since then is shorter, but even so it’s still been a few years by inquisition.

he also has a decent singing voice. again, nothing that would make a sea witch want to steal his voice, but it’s still pleasant. the main thing he lacks is range. he’s better suited to softer songs, and while he may have played instruments in public from time to time you’d rarely have found him singing. at least until the rebellion, where music was a part of the subculture that formed.

he’s also dabbled in other visual arts. the first art form he truly learned was pottery, and he’s done sculpture. sculpture is probably the best example for something he’s forgotten, simply because he relied more upon magic and the malleable nature of the world around him than he did with other art forms. i’ve spoken that some of his ability degradation is due to the new realities he’s adjusting to- namely that his healing abilities were useless in a veiled world. sculpture was similar, in that he could essentially talk the stone into the proper shape with the help of a chisel. with painting, even when he used magic the steps were the same, he just had a much wider point of pigments.

it’s difficult to name something he tried and then moved on from when he turned out to not be particularly good. we have references in codices that it wasn’t uncommon for things to take years/centuries in elvhenan, so things he had interest in but little talent, he had the time/resources to dedicate himself to it.

one style of visual art he tried his hand at and found he a) wasn’t very talented and b) didn’t enjoy it was woodcuts and prints. it coupled sculpting, something he was always sort of alright at, with a flat picture. in the end the time spent felt a bit fruitless when he knew he could create a better product were he to use ink on paper. i’d say he tried that for a few weeks before moving on. there are other skills he’s forgotten like shapeshifting (although after absorbing flemythal’s powers he regains that power) and on the whole his magic is weakened.

HOLLY YOU’RE SO KIND TO ME WHAT THE FUCK… and just for context, holly did send me another ask, but that one’s not at straightforward to explain as this one so i’m answering them. out of order. cause i just gotta talk about the one and only aquinea pavus.

( what holly is referring to is my dumbass fanfic about dorian’s homecoming, which features her pretty prominently and is, thus far, the only place where i have written aquinea. there’s time yet for me to let her try to fuck up dorian’s life though lmao )

first, i think i need to say that the conception of my idea for aquinea as she exists within the realms of this blog is… honestly… because i hate halward sdkgjsd which sounds really. ridiculous because aquinea is awful but hear me out : halward is a piece of shit but looking at him and how he interacts with dorian and just the man himself, i found it hard to convince myself that he was the singular mastermind behind everything that happened to dorian. sure, i guess that i can believe that desperation can lead the man who taught dorian to hate blood magic to use blood magic, but what about dorian, himself? his personality? his inability to compromise, at times. his demeanor. his frank cruelty. nature vs nurture, and all that.  also, i found it weird that she was barely mentioned at all and i wanted an explanation for that.

and then i thought about his mother. what kind of woman she could be. the possibilities were, technically, endless, given that we have practically no information about her. and then the gears in my head started turning, and i thought about a haughty woman with dorian’s eyes and his mannerisms and her being just about everything he didn’t want to be.

AQUINEA OF HOUSE PAVUS, PREVIOUSLY THALRASSIAN. daughter of brutus and floriana. the eldest of three. she is a girl who had broad aspirations and wished, above all else, to be part of the magisterium. for the power. for the esteem. she vied for a seat on the magisterium, very nearly swaying her paternal uncle to choose her over his son with mediocre magical talents, who would resent her forevermore.

she is an uncompromising woman who is a loyalist and a traditionalist at heart and when she was denied a seat on the magisterium and married off to a future magister, instead, she found herself infuriated and devastated in turns. halward, back then, was somewhat kind and a bit of a romantic. she despised him from the start, resented him, and the fact that she was denied what she wanted the most. the terms of their marriage were very much set by her, and as dorian says, his parents utterly loathed each other. when she conceived dorian, she moved into the opposite wing of the pavus manor.

and she loves dorian. truly, for all that she lacked a single maternal bone in her body. he is her son, after all, and she had her favored handmaid / guard watch over him as he grew up. she taught him to be sure in himself and to be uncompromising and to prove himself, to everyone, that he was BETTER. that he was POWERFUL. that he was GIFTED. because he was. because she was proud of him and coveted him as her son, beloved and a jewel to the household. she speaks highly of him and boasts about him to her altus friends and everything.

so yes, aquinea loves her son. but she is a traditionalist and uncompromising and thus she would rip away the parts of him that she disapproves of : his soft heart and his preference for men, namely.

( is that love? no, not really. that’s control. does she love him? perhaps. is everything she does for love? she certainly thinks so / and he rationalizes that she wants what is best for him. their definitions simply don’t line up. )

aquinea is very much a woman who is willing to do what needs to be done to get to the endgame that she wants. she failed to get a seat on the magisterium, but she tends to succeed in everything and anything else. and she thought she molded her son perfectly. she thought that she taught him right. yet : she didn’t. and so she turns to the next best option well within her control. BLOOD MAGIC. her own, namely, as she dabbles in blood magic. so to speak. ironic, isn’t it? all those years of halward softening her son, leading to this.

she did what had to be done. or, tried to, anyways.

( an excerpt from my own writing skdgjns )

❝ Typical, ❞ tone like an arrow set aflame and he breaks into movement, pushing past her and pacing further into the office / catching sight of HIS FATHER’S BLOOD / pacing in the other direction. ❝ You always encouraged extremes. Prove your worth, Dorian, prove that you are stronger than your peers, Dorian, prove that you are the most powerful in the Circle, Dorian. Change who you are, Dorian —— oh, you don’t want to be miserable, like I am? I suppose that we will merely have to use blood magic on you, since you won’t play along. ❞

❝ I will not apologize, ❞ his mother slices across his ranting and he turns sharply towards her and they glare at each other once more and he knows that their gazes are a mirror of each other. ❝ Your father may have been weak enough to apologize to you, but I will NOT. I was doing what I thought was best for you, my son, damn the consequences. ❞

❝ Even if the consequence is your son? ❞ accusing / accusing / please say no.

❝ YES. ❞

His mother has always been cold. She lacks a single maternal bone in her body, in truth. It has always been this way. Dorian knows that she loves him, or perhaps she loves the concept of him, or perhaps she loves only parts of him : he hasn’t decided yet which would be worse.

it should be noted that aquinea is loyal for all that she is cruel and for all that she hated halward, he was her husband and she tried to save him the night that he died. she tried. she truly did. for all that they differed, for all that they hated each other, for all the different lessons that they taught dorian, in spite of it all.

anyways this is getting way longer than i anticipated but a final word : aquinea sees a lot of herself in dorian, including her stubbornness and self-confidence. all things that she put in him, deliberately, and perhaps her greatest failure is that he didn’t turn out much like her, after all. and on the flip side, dorian knows that he is very much like his mother… and he’s trying to unlearn the worst parts of that. bit by bit.

oh also she’s a fire focus. ha.

@weptfire​

☱

[a bookmarked page of Briala’s journal , left out before leaving for a mission]

My great aunt is worried about sending me to the vineyard club this evening. While I’ll inevitably be suffering all the members’ gossiping , I can sense her fear for more than that. I think she’s afraid I’ll trip up the long cobblestone path and make a fool of us both. Mostly , I think she’s just worried about things going sideways for me. I love her for it , but it makes me worry in kind. I hold no illusions that her reputation is important [illegible scratched out writing] and so I know I cannot fail her in this regard. Perhaps I can bring her back some of the select white wine when I return.