virshiral

He finds her in an ancient temple, hand upon an eluivan. She is pouring her power into it, knowledge granted by June. The child who is not a child, living in the skin of another. She is...human. Tall and stronger than he, now, armored and glorious. She stands with pride, her back straight, and she has used a mystery of magic and metal to sculpt her hair into spikes that sweep behind her into four majestic dragon horns. She is not hiding who she is.

"I knew you would come," Mythal says, and for all that the voice is not hte one e knew, it still slides into his heart with the familiarity of a knife. "You should not have given your orb to Corypheous, Dread Wolf."

Solas keeps coming forward, even as the title lands heavily upon his shoulders. That she would name him thus, despite all she knows of him, is a betrayal that cuts deep. He gave her everything, gave of himself to keep her safe and alive. He sacrificed the People - his and hers - so that she might not be lost to the Void. And she calls him Dread Wolf.

Mythal takes her hand from the eluivan, turns to look at him and - oh. It is her. Truly. There is no mistaking the wisdom in those eyes, the cruelness of that mouth. Mythal is not in the body he knew her in, but that is her spirit shining back at him. Hers...and his.

"I was too weak to unlock it after my long slumber," he says, trying to tell her everything when there is no time to explain anything. These shemlen die in numbers beyond counting every second he leaves the veil up. All of the People are suffering, their natures bound and unnatural. It his his fault, and he, the only one left who can make it right. "The failure was mine." The veil. It did exactly what he had expected...and so much more. "I should pay the price." But he wasn't the one paying it. All the elvhen, and all the spirits were instead. He cannot allow himself the comfort of death until he has repaid the debts he owes, returned all the People to who they were meant to be. "But the People. They need me."

He comes to her, as he had so many times before, with his head down, and sorrow in his heart. He had saved her, yes. Kept her from the Void when Elgar'nan had struck her down. But it had been a cruelty to do so, he sees at last. He had reduced her immeasurably, left her stripped of a body, an untethered soul in a physical world. Worse, he had bound her to him thus, his spirit trapping hers. He needed his strength back, could not tear down the veil without it. But to do so would unwind her soul from its moorings. She would not survive another sundering. His entire being cried out at the thought. He was threaded so tightly within her, they were as one. He would be killing himself as surely as he killed her. She did not deserve yet another betrayal, another death at the hand of one who swore to love her, even as the blow was struck. And yet. Solas would do it all the same. She was right to name him Dread Wolf.

"I am so sorry," he tells her, close enough to touch, his head down and eyes closed in shame.

She reaches for him, comfort and love in her touch, as there always was. She pulls him close, hand on his face, fingers curled around the back of his neck. She leans in, presses her forehead to his. There are tears in her voice. "I am sorry as well, old friend."

He lingers a moment, presses his cheek into her hand. How can he do this to her? How can he not? Mythal. His oldest friend. His dearest love. Twinned with him so tightly, he can feel her heart beat against his. She presses against him with her hand, he sees her lips curl into a smile. Does she know what he means to do? She could not stop him if she did. Perhaps she does not struggle to spare them both the pain, when he refuses her command to stop.

He is cruel, to linger so. To drag out her last moments like this. He comforts himself, not her, when he teeters on the edge of what he must do. He must murder Mythal. He looks up into her eyes, sees her resolve.

Solas strikes.

He feels it, when his spirit hits her, as a blow against himself. He tears into her, hears her gasp of pain and rapture as she arches in his arms. There is no defense against one's own soul, and there is nothing she can do to keep him away, as he burrows into her heart. He finds himself, deep inside her being, threaded into all her cracks and crevices, the thread that holds her together. He unknots those ties, and he can feel the way her soul shudders as it once again begins to fracture without him there to bind her together.

I am sorry, I am sorry, I am so very sorry, he thinks, even as he continues to recall himself from her, leaving devastation in his wake. She was not built to survive the sundering of the soul dealt to her by her husband.

Her head is falling, arms lax at her side, and Solas wraps one arm around her back, the other a brace at her waist as he gently lowers her to the ground in a lover's embrace, even as he tears the heart of one he loved with his being. He bows his head over her, unwilling to see the effect he has wrought, though he knows the image well enough. Her eyes will be going dull, her skin darkening as the luster of her magic leaves, there will be nothing left to her when he is done, nothing to go to the Void. He will have betrayed her more thoroughly than even Elgar'nan did.

No. He will not hide from this. He has killed his soul, and he will give her the honor of watching her last moments. Solas lifts his head, can see the threads of his being sliding back into himself after so long being tied to her and...she lingers. In this moment of half-life when there is not enough of him left in her to maintain her shape, but she has not yet dissolved so much as to have lost her form entirely, she is still here in spirit, if not in flesh. A ghost of a ghost, pressed against the fabric of the world as softly as a feather on the wind.

Solas reaches out - no. he cannot tie her to him again. That would only extend his cruelty to even richer depths of depravity. He must let her go. He uses magic instead, tendrils of the fade curled gently around her spirit, cradling her close.

"Mythal," he weeps, voice broken for what he has done. "Ar lasa mala revas."

He tucks her edges together; still tattered, still torn, he presses them together so she appears to be whole, even while knowing that nothing is there to keep it so. He folds her raw parts inside, wrapping them in the stronger parts of her self that could still possibly survive the fade. It will not be enough - cannot be enough. The first bit of anything she encounters will unfold his careful creases, blow her soul open and break the strands of herself that still exist, bridging the gaps between her being. But still, he tries. He molds her spirit into a different shape, all the shredded bits of her still there, just in a different configuration that appears to be complete.

Then, with his full power now, he opens a tear into the fade, and lovingly slides her into it. If she can hide, if she can heal, the fade might just give her a chance. It was something he could not have managed, before. The world was not as it is. But now, maybe. There is the smallest chance that some part of her will survive. Even if that part no longer knows his name, it is enough to know there is a possibility.

Bull and Krem were waiting for her as she walked up the steps, Bull surprisingly unobtrusive as he leaned in the shadows with a pair of boots in hand and a green mercenary coat with breeches draped over his arm.

“You wanna get out of town?” he asked. “Dorian and Viv will cover for you. Do the politics song and dance. Sera can make a distraction. We all talked about it.”

She shouldn’t. She should sit in more interminable meetings about exactly how the Inquisition was going to be disbanded, go over what they’d learned about the Viddasala’s plan. Probably tell them more about Solas. She just wanted to go home, wherever that was. She wasn’t sure. Maybe she didn’t have one. Home for her had always been with the people she loved, and she couldn’t go back to her clan and make them a target, and all of her friends with the Inquisition were going their separate ways.