AN: I don't own anything.
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"Pride After the Fall"
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She clutched his pale hands into her pallid own, gently, like a daughter drawing her father out from a long and troubled sleep. With bloodstained and calloused skin, she pled without words for him to return to the waking world again. Away, persistent dreams, her hands said. Out of the shadows my hahren must walk, for if he be lost, where would I go? — Remember this touch. As he cradled the shattered pieces of his orb, she embraced his cold and trembling fingers.
"Ir abelas, lethallin," she whispered, her tone strained, sympathetic, like wind chimes carved by a younger sister from the dead wood of a favourite tree. "I am so sorry."
At this, he looked up—shock tearing through the thick haze of his regrets. Pale eyes met the same, on a freckled face curtained by tangled raven locks matted with gore. How, he wondered, dread wrenching his tired heart. Does she know?
As if she read his question on his face, the elven lass trembled a weary smile. Faintly dimpled cheeks shone a sad kind of happiness through caked mud and drying reds.
"I do not know much," she admitted, her eyes flickering down to the broken orb. "But I know enough to know that this… this must pain you, hahren."
"I lied to you," he breathed. A small part of his heart unclenched at the confession. Another tightened, and coiled itself around the truths he might acknowledge but would not dare speak.
"You did," she agreed, her voice soft. "But why should that change anything?" She grasped his hands tighter, so that they gripped the sundered pieces of the orb together. "Ma melava halani. You were my teacher and my friend. Still are, in fond memory, if no longer you can bear to be in name."
He shut his eyes as she leaned her head forward to rest on his. Pains from the recently concluded battle wracked both their frames as the adrenaline of standing on the brink of death pounded down, down their veins to the deepest chambers of recollection in their bodies. He felt tired and sore and furious and upset and… proud. Strangely proud, of the young woman before him.
Quiet, composed. Her spirit and her magic both like a gently flowing stream. Clear water running atop smooth rocks, cool against heated flesh drenched with sweat and aches and pains. It had taken him longer than he liked to admit, to see the wisp of a girl as little more than a child, thrust into events and circumstances beyond her deepest fears and ken. To understand that the water of her magic was not a youngling's playful game, but a reflection of both the best and worst of her: how she could drown one's lungs and boil one's blood with but a thought and nary a whisper. How she could clean infected wounds and tease laughing droplets out of cloudless skies to awaken the slumbering grass with timeless dew.
It shamed him, how long it had taken him to see that her compassion was not that of an innocent's, but that of one to whom desperation was a familiar friend. Not a daughter's feckless tenderness, but a mother's weathered empathy. Had she not been First of her clan, before she had become the Herald? Had she not learned at the knee of an elder responsible for the welfare of her people, before she had been tutored by humans of the reconstituted Inquisition?
She had shared with him both memories and dreams, as he guided her through the basics of his manipulations of the Fade. Shown him stillborn infants birthed into her hands and the grief of a parent that would not be. Nightmares in which hunters gone a fortnight returned with shattered hands and severed ears, crawling on their knees and elbows in dread and hope for dragging their battered bodies toward safe haven. The acorn she intended to bury with her mother had her corpse not been burned to ashes by shemlen flames, worn around her neck and clasped at times for wordless prayer.
The girl might have a young face, but her eyes were old—and he was ever more the fool for underestimating her yet again.
"Must you leave?" she asked in a whisper, her throat hoarse. "Are you so intent to walk this path alone, after all we've done together?"
He shook his head. "You know what would happen if I stayed," he replied.
"They will blame us." As they always do, her old words echoed in his head.
"For my mistakes."
"No," she growled. "For the ambition of a false god."
"Which one?"
A rueful grin. "The one we just killed, of course."
A bitter laugh. "And what… what of my—?"
"Your ambitions?" she interrupted. "Your ancient pride?"
"I have condemned the world twice over."
"Then we shall save it yet again, lethallin," she entreated.
"A daring task."
She grasped his face. "No less daring than my calling you a friend, and meaning it."
He drew back from her.
"You shouldn't," he growled.
"I can be quite stubborn," she spoke softly.
"Then that mistake, you can make yourself."
He rose, and she followed suit. In the distance, they could hear the others, ascending the steps to the level of the ruined structure where they were. Cries of Inquisitor! from a Nevarran's tongue; Oy, Buckles! Where you at? from a reckless, whimsical Fereldan. A trumpet in the distance, and a roar. The wind, which had just a moment ago seemed so quiet, tore about them once more.
"I must go. This journey I must walk alone." He did not beg. It was not in him to beg forgiveness, no matter how much he hungered for it.
The raven-haired elf shook her head, fleeting sorrow in an ephemeral twist of her lips. He would remember that, would he not? How the girl scowled when her heart was heavy. Such a strange expression on a face like hers.
"Ma nuvenin," she whispered, her shoulders slumped. "Ma nuvenin, hahren. Falon."
He parted his lips, eyes stuck on her downcast head. He could make out the tears on her cheeks and felt his heart clench. For a breath of a moment, he made to move towards her—to put a hand on her arm, to offer her some measure of comfort, as inexperienced as he was in giving it despite his years. To beg a smile from her, some measure of gladness—or anger, vindication, betrayal, some tempestuous emotion—rather than this countenance of defeat at the dusk of her greatest triumph.
Instead, he turned away, and with silent steps, left behind his student and unexpected friend. It is not my place, he pleaded to himself. It is not my place to let her hope for such a damned soul as mine; to share the price that is my willful burden.
"Dareth shiral," the words came muted with the wind. The final gasp of something precious dying, its spirit departing to a place of eternal rest. A lone white halla torn from its herd, bled out in the forest from a wound it had earned by baring its neck freely to a predator it had loved.
Whether the words had been hers, or his, he neither knew—nor needed wonder.