It smelled like many things now, in the hall. Neither happiness nor sadness has a smell that a nose made for a human can pick up on, and so Cole didn't sense that; stress and strain did have smells, however, and, allegedly, so did fear. Cole wondered if Solas would have known it, and then forgot to wonder promptly. It did smell of strain, perhaps, but otherwise, it smelled much the way it sounded, of warmth from candles and fires, wood burning; of dancing, or some of the strain off of it, the sort that people liked as a reminder that they were still living; and of bitter drinks and of several kinds of food. Eating, Blackwall had said. That'd be first. Not only hungering, but keeping food down. Cole could now much better guess how it tasted.

Cole had only felt the need as the real Cole before. (He is a real Cole now. He had felt it living in a copy from which another copy would be made, and from which the feeling would, in the future, be read.) He had thought that he needed to eat, and let it pass and forgot when it did. The first time he has felt it as himself has come and passed. It was frightening in words without a Fade song blocking the needlepoint—beginnings of snakes tying themselves in knots and swallowing each other with nothing else to swallow, and he'd thought that this was what killed me first. Squeezing stomach, approaching done, like bleeding except that it happens when everything is where it is meant to be; more like water running.

The Inquisitor had brought him a piece of herbed bread from the kitchens and a cup of water. Drinking was what Blackwall had said would come next. Cole had taken nibbles, remembered what it was to drink, thought of water in a pond, cooling the smoke-filled throat, and then gone. Cold, outside and in, cleaned.

The bit of bitterness in the air was still unfamiliar, on a direct level—it wrinkled his nose, faintly, when a decanter popped uncorked.

The holder wasn't any other than Blackwall, in fact, just under a meter away, armor as dark and shiny as the decanter. Cole turned to watch the quiet for ripples, the shine for a shimmer, pressing up off his knees where he crouched on the table.

Blackwall had said that drinking for real would come third, and intention flickered—now the man thought that he may as well see it when it did, trying to make himself all the happier, to see more resolved. Cole wasn't sure how clearly and fully he could hear the notion, but he nodded, sketching it out with charcoal in his head. Nothing had really ended yet—too much was still in progress, or starting. Blackwall needed to be there to hold the roof up, continued sentence in a failure to make it feel more finished. He thought he heard Blackwall begin to speak a moment before he did, but by the time it came to mind to question, the point was null.

"Come on, Cole—'realer', right? Indulge me," the big bearded man said, watching the rim of the bottle and then aside to be sure he was heard. Their eyes met.

A Grey Warden dies protecting. When the black wall fell I held the roof up with my hands. There will still be weather to weather.

Blackwall's then pulled off to a corner, and the thought wound itself snuffed quiet like a disappearing plume of smoke. Cole's thoughts made a single swat in the air to grab after it, and then let it disappear, poising at the ready like a cat watching a ghost as Blackwall spoke again. "Sera's not joining me, you see; off chasing a skirt, or something. She asked me to piss off. Kindly, for her. Says she doesn't need a wingman. But winning a war seems a sorry occasion for drinking alone, and if she doesn't see me splitting a bottle with you, all the better."

Cole leaned forward. Blackwall lifted and tilted a bottle; a crystal curve warped and sparkled in distortion, then thinned and flowed and splashed like a settled pondering into one glass. It stopped, and then into another. The two glasses were equally-filled.

"One whole glass?" Cole asked.

"I'm not going to hold your nose and force you to drink every drop of yours. But you are eating and drinking now. The Inquisitor told us all so. And, night like tonight—us bringing down he who would usurp the Maker's throne—"

Black City. Black Walls. A usurper from the origin of purpose, brought down by a stranger followed by a man who wishes to wear the name. Too good, but not good enough. How much higher can we go, how much higher will I steal. Built, and stones fall, but in war, victory. No one thinks I am a wall anymore, but I will serve. If I had died tonight, I would have fulfilled only two of the three oaths. Three tributes, tithe toward fulfillment of the borrowed name.

Cole backed out into the layer that meant it was a joke, although the statement was true, if made to sound thinner.

"—give us a little more to celebrate. One more for your coming parade of firsts as a real boy."

Blackwall picked up both glasses and held one out to Cole, who eyed up the sides and curves of the glass, so thin the light barely held inside it and the idea looked like that of touching a bubble. Cole chanced it, and it lit down like a butterfly.

With the lack of illumination around it, the wine looked black. Cole balanced the glass in both hands and peeked inside. The scent congealed in his nose until he sneezed. The wine jumped. A streak of it licked the edge of the glass and tossed a bead into the air, which bounced, Cole blinking at the wrong moment to see where it landed, instead watching the unspilled wine settle.

Blackwall made a noise.

"Was that bad?" Cole asked.

"Not really, just—" His eyes shifted aside again, and back. He swished his glass moodily. "You're not supposed to smell it like that. Hasn't anyone ever… I don't know. Haven't you ever overheard that? In heads or not. You want to smell it, you're supposed to waft it."

"Why?"

"Maker's balls, I couldn't tell you. Ask Dorian for a lesson in the finer points of proper wine-tasting later, Cole. Not yet. Just do me a favor. Raise your glass."

It was a toast. This, Cole understood. He did as told, and Blackwall reached his own glass out. Cole watched them meet with a ring and, under it, another splash, silenced, smothering itself. "To victory," Blackwall said, and drank, barely turning, his eyes on Cole's glass.

Cole pulled it back in, took another look to Blackwall, still looking back, waiting for him to drink.

And then he nodded, and stared at the liquid until his eyes could pull the red in it from the purple, brightening the black, making it look like something that is meant to be drunk. The smell was heady again, and he tried to think through samplings on others' heads, so that he'd likewise be ready to drink it, but any impression he could catch ahold of was damp in the sound of the hall, and he shut it out for clarity. He drank—and bit his teeth down over flashing lukewarm fire, nose wrinkling again and face flickering and flinching from it. Something still wanted to slip loose, and so he let out a sound: "Nnnngh."

Blackwall laughed. "Should've expected that, shouldn't I. How was it, boy?"

It cleared out—mind flaring yellow and coolness in his throat where he had swallowed. He swallowed again to check it. "Warm," said Cole. "But cold where it used to be."

"It isn't even that strong, as far as wine goes. Just all right, too, in terms of quality. Not bad, though. Probably better to start small. Go on, have another sip. Or don't. It's up to you."

The glass shook unconsciously in Cole's hands. He closed his eyes, nodding again. A golden glow, a shimmer across a fake Veil. He wrinkled his nose once more preemptively and took another small sip—swallows the sound, and stepped across it. The air felt to be a different pressure. The cold evened—voices hummed and harmonized, all smoothing.

Drunkenness is fake dreamwalking, he thought, with impressions un-dampening. The fake Fade is what many people do this for.

"Don't suppose you're thinking about him," said Blackwall. "Getting any visions off a reminder, or anything." Cole's eyes popped open. Blackwall tilted his head slightly, shook it out. "The real Cole. Had he ever had a taste of wine before he…?" A shrug.

Cole was a real Cole, but not the real Cole. The question completed itself. He went quiet and focused.

"…No," he decided. "He never did. He was—" He was, or he did…? Clarity, Cole, can you clear it. He pulled his eyes away.

There was a young elven man there at the table, pushing the air in front of him to the side with a wave. "Mind moving over, friend? You're like a roosting hen."

Cole's mind snapped back into his body and found it was a bit too airy for it, suspended from the fake Fade. He nodded, hard, and pressed himself aside and kicked a leg down, and it fell harder and faster than he had predicted. Cole swung, arms out, and the elf hopped aside. The wine nearly spilled but did not. Cole caught himself.

Both shoes on the ground. Mind hanging up, and body hanging from mind. Swinging to a stop, like a windchime when the wind's subsided.

A controlled swing to the side, to the elven man, already pretending to have forgotten and leaning onto the table to pick at food. "Sorry," Cole said.

"'Excuse me' will do," said the elf. He didn't mean it meanly.

"Is that right?" Cole asked Blackwall—a swing and shuffle back the other way. Took more to stop the momentum, the pendulum on the string.

Blackwall's glass was full again, and he was leaning back with it, lower back resting against edge of the table. "Don't see how it matters now."

"That doesn't answer my question."

Blackwall made a blowing sound—it was a laugh, but it was difficult to tell how much real mirth was in it, even listening behind the beard. "I can beat you at your own game now, then."

Cole blinked his eyes wider, to look like he was asking a new question until he could think of which one to commit to words. He didn't know what game he was supposed to be playing—and yet he knows what Blackwall meant.

He lay it down and copied, leaning as well instead of sitting like a roosting hen again, holding the glass in a mirror of Blackwall and then setting it down.

He watched those milling and mingling, murmuring, misgiving whispers wiped away by merriment. Mirth. The voices buzzed on, and he focused at one set or another, experimentally, hearing them tune louder and softer or sharper around edges, between faces and voices, with a vibrating torchlight for the Inquisitor. He wanders up along the false Veil, up the stairs, through the Inquisitor's quarters. Eyes on the balcony are watching for the sun, as never in too long had it seemed so entirely certain that the dawn will come. Cole thought he saw it early, something just-so, and his eyes went full with it—

And then he blinked.

Water poured in a soft, closing circle over the fire like a whisper to soothe. The focus disconnected. Let the Inquisitor have that dawn, for now, or their share of it, bright as the Anchor, sky pulled closed, clean, and sealed with a soft stroke of a hand like the eyes of a corpse that no longer need suffer an old sickness—

The door on the light closed. His head dropped down into his chest. A torch held above his head yet inside it.

He was in the room again, and his thought began to drift in sound and scent again, feeling out the patterns, into a song.

Everyone here was hoping, the hope of having time left after all, of not dying, a happy or relieved hope, or a nervous one, or a guilty or rueful one at being left Blackwall hoped for peace so that he could be vigilant, and the Inquisitor hoped to see the world pull fixed to mirror the Fade. (Was the Fade fixed? Cole wouldn't tell, until he slept. I won't dream like Solas. I will only see where I am allowed to go.) Cassandra hoped, and Dorian hoped, and the Iron Bull hoped, and Vivienne hoped, and Sera hoped, and Varric hoped, and Leliana and Josephine and Cullen and his soldiers and the refugees and the merchants and messengers and smiths and the elven man at the table and the human man who was crossing his legs and pointing in the Inquisitor's throne who Cassandra was huffing and crossing over to pull off were all hoping. The shades mixed and melted together in the hum to hope itself.

He steeped in the color and in every shade, and he was happy for now, too, beginning to sway, unbindable, free and for the future as the rest of them. On that level of resonance, some of the unease started to shake clearer, less a pull and more a call, and he stood up to meet it.

He thanked Blackwall; Blackwall asked whatever for.

"—For sharing the wine," Cole said.

"You don't have to humor me, Cole. You didn't even like it." Blackwall shrugged, shoulders-only. "Anyway, don't you go spreading that I gave you any, all right? Mind you, if you do, it's my fault. I'm already out of the good graces of too many. I should've thought sooner that I don't need being a bad influence on you to my list of crimes."

"You are becoming more like a Grey Warden, now. And you know it. I heard it."

"That's a 'no' on you growing out of rooting around in others' heads." Blackwall's face twitched and pinned beneath the hair. "But I hope you're right, Cole."

He didn't hope; he knew. A point to leave unstated.

Cole rose away from the table and he mingled without even realizing he was mingling, forgot to make them forget or fail to notice; affirmations and agreements were enough to tune strings to harmony in the hall, and he was apart yet there, up and flying and floating with eyes on the morning. Not on him, he only halfway thought, but not off of him; as the lights became that much brighter he was caught in it and belonged, both stoking others' and carrying for himself the kind of torch that mortals have, for everyone's time, for growing heroism and betterment, for the Herald's dawn, for the Inquisition's dawn, for the victory of the chance to try. Mortal hope in a song of thought.

Just as a person does, he slept that night—lay down the still-heavy body to let his mind float, from the fake Fade to the real one, holding hands and agreeing with the others' trust that he would float back from it safely when the sun was bright.