How many pages in did I say I decided to change tenses? Ten? Turns out it's 20. Yeah. I would be hitting my keyboard in frustration were it a slightly less expensive model.

One translation. Again. At the bottom. Again.

Identity

The Fade. Latha. Of course.

Tonight something was different, though. Latha wasn't waiting for me with its usual quiet patience - the patience that threatened to drive me mad on a near-nightly basis. Tonight it flickered, weaving a little from side to side, while it mumbled or hummed to itself.

"Is something wrong?" I asked it.

"I spoke to him." Its voice contained an irritating hum, and it sounded considerably less like Solas than it usually did. "I told him you don't believe we love you."

"You saw Solas?" I asked, trying to wrap my mind around this possibility. Understanding would be necessary before I could seek a way to make use of its actions.

"Yes," it said, and I heard an uncanny echo of the word spreading out around us. "I told him you don't believe we love you. I - I didn't know. He needed to know. We both needed to know."

If Latha had been anything with a corporeal form, I would have urged it to take a few deep breaths to calm itself. "Why?" I asked instead, because I didn't know how one went about calming a spirit. "Why does he need to know?"

Latha froze, its head slowly turning toward me. "Because we love you. We would never want you to believe otherwise. It hurts you to think your love is not returned." All at once, it began to flicker again. "He said - he said to let you believe it. That you would be happier."

I shrugged, pushing away a stab of hurt. "Yes, that sounds like Solas."

"But you are not happier," Latha said.

"Of course not," I agreed, and then decided to extend Solas a little credit. Not much - but a little. "He may not know that."

"He knows it," Latha insisted, the hum in its voice growing into something that made me grit my teeth in discomfort. "We know it."

Oh. Well, that was a perspective I hadn't considered. "Then he lied." I shrugged again. "He lies a great deal." Badly, for the most part, but it didn't stop him from putting considerable effort into it.

The spirit seemed to pull in on itself. "Not to us," it whispered. "Not to me. Not to himself. Not about you. Not anymore. It was what he vowed before he opened himself up to me. No more lies, he promised."

I closed my eyes, glad for once that Solas wasn't before me. I would have strangled him. "Maybe...he's changing the way he feared he would," I suggested, groping for some means of excusing him.

"No," Latha replied, the word echoing into a shrill cry of despair. "If it were that, he would have said: it doesn't matter. But he said: she will be happier."

"I - yes, that makes sense," I allowed. "I'm - I'm sorry, Latha. He lies. I'm not even certain he always knows when he's doing it, especially when he's lying to himself."

"That is what I fear," the spirit whispered, the word "fear" becoming a roar as its echoes bounced around us. "If we - if he - if I am not what we - I - believe, then what am I? What other lies are incorporated in my very being?"

"Solas," I muttered, "you...dahn'direlan." I had the sinking feeling that I was watching a spirit become corrupted before my eyes.

"I am no danger to you," Latha said as though reading my thoughts, and suddenly it sounded more like Solas than ever. "Because you have touched the Fade with your physical self, there is more of you here than is usual for someone who isn't a mage. Your ability to remain lucid when you dream is one of the effects. But it isn't enough that a spirit could take possession of you, even if it wanted to. And I have no desire to do so."

"That is good to know," I said carefully, wondering all the while if I believed it - and which parts I didn't believe, if not.

We fell silent for a moment, my thoughts racing.

"What do you intend to do about the lies?" I asked.

The spirit shimmered, becoming less cohesive. "You know what they are," it whispered, tendrils of its substance reaching out to me and then recoiling just as swiftly. "The lies are about you. You know which parts of me are wrong."

"Very likely," I allowed. "What do you want me to do about it?" I didn't know how much the average spirit could be redirected. Cole learned to become nearly human, but those were extraordinary circumstances, and Cole might have been an extraordinary spirit, besides. Latha seemed near to disintegrating right now, and I hadn't the least idea how to fix that - or if it could be fixed.

Or, to be honest, if I wanted to fix it.

Latha remained silent for a long moment. "Are you happier, not seeing what Fen'Harel is becoming?" it asked at last.

"Never," I told it vehemently. Whatever Solas was doing could not possibly be worse than the possibilities I was capable of imagining. And if he lost himself in becoming Fen'Harel, how could I ever find peace knowing that I hadn't been there as the last of him slipped away unobserved, unloved, without anything to mark its death? "Never," I repeated, willing the tears from my eyes.

"Then that lie is where we begin," Latha said. "Do you remember our time in the Fade? What I told you there? This place is shaped by your will. You must will your way to - to - " It faltered. "Him. You must will your way to him."

"That's...all?" I asked. It couldn't be that simple. Nothing was that simple in the Fade.

"Yes," Latha said. "That is all. Your will must overcome Fen'Harel's."

Oh, certainly, that wasn't in the least a crack - giant fissure, really - in this plan. I only had to set my will against Solas's.

"The only chance lies with you," Latha said, perhaps by way of reassurance. "Though I try to maintain the cohesion of my purpose, you will always be my weakness, ma vhenan. I am incapable of turning my entire will against you." It paused, shimmered, came back into focus, its features a little less defined. When it spoke, it had again lost something of Solas. "The catch is you may not be able to truly stand up to him only dreaming yourself into the Fade. He resides here, now, and his will is that of someone fully awake and aware."

I did not want to follow that implication out to its logical conclusion, but my mind continued on even without permission: "You're saying I might have to physically enter the Fade. Again. Only this time without the Anchor, without a cataclysmic Breach - without even access to the eluvian labyrinth."

"Yes," the spirit said.

"I don't know if that is possible," I told it.

"Is any of this possible?" Latha asked, this time sounding so much like Solas that I had to glance at it to reassure myself he hadn't suddenly appeared. "Neither of us knows - which is not unlike many of the things you have already accomplished."

It was so precisely the sort of thing Solas would have said to me that I had to turn away from Latha to compose myself. "Show me how to begin," I said without looking at the spirit.

"Walk," it advised, "and hold your destination in your mind."

"And what about when I wake?" I asked.

"I will teach you to construct a sort of landmark - or beacon, perhaps - to call yourself back through whatever progress you manage to make. All it requires is focus and emotion. You possess more than enough of both." I hazarded a glance at Latha to find it - not watching me, exactly, but its face was turned in my direction, and it had tilted its head in that way Solas had when he was intent upon explaining something new. I shivered, and looked away again. What it had said, earlier - ma vhenan. The endearment hadn't escaped me. I could feel a restlessness - perhaps it might be a hunger - growing inside it. Before, it had been content to reflect Solas. It hadn't always remembered, because it was a spirit, but it had been happy enough holding a mirror to Solas's light.

Now that it had judged him wanting, I thought perhaps it wanted to be Solas. To me, anyway. That was getting far too near demon territory for my comfort - but Latha was also my only chance at finding my way through the Fade. I would have to take the risk.

Take it - and hope Latha wasn't lying about its inability to possess me.

"All right," I told my companion, "I suppose we shouldn't waste any more of the night." We began walking. "Tell me more about leaving a landmark or a beacon or whatever it is," I requested of the spirit.

"A memory with strong feelings behind it is the easiest way," it replied. "Did you not notice - ? Perhaps the scale threw you off." Latha stopped and turned, gesturing behind us. Though it felt like we had only walked perhaps a dozen paces, I recognized the place I had entered the Fade much further behind us than that. From this distance, I saw that what I had taken to be an enormous pillar of stone was actually an enormous pillar of stacked stone...books. Squinting, I could make out images in the texture of the stone. A room. A bed. A man seated in a chair - reading. The textures swam before my eyes as though animated, and I averted my gaze with a shudder. "You see?" Latha said. "A strong memory - so strong it drew you back."

"That was - where we were last night?" I asked. "How do you know?" I couldn't tell - and not only because there was now a giant pillar rising from the ground. All the Fade looked largely the same to me.

I felt Latha's regard again. "All right," I said, "foolish question."

"Come," the spirit said. "Reorient your intent. We will need to stop well before dawn, as you will need time to remember something with sufficient strength to draw you back tomorrow."

"That was one of my favorite memories," I murmured. "I would have saved it, had I known."

"You will have no trouble finding another adequate one," Latha assured me.

Time was strange in the Fade. I knew it already, but it struck me more forcefully as I attempted to travel somewhere specific again. The more firmly I focused on my destination, the more time and distance seemed to hasten by, until what felt like single steps skipped us from scene to scene - almost as though the Fade-reality itself was merely a set of stepping stones within some greater reality.

Another impression I would have questioned Solas about, in another time and place.

It seemed only a short while before Latha stopped me, and yet I felt as though we had crossed continents.

"Time to remember?" I asked it.

"Would you like to talk it over? It may help draw out the emotion, make it more real," the spirit asked in return.

"No," I said quickly. I had shared memories with Latha the night before in pursuit of a point, and before the spirit started acting...different. I didn't think I needed its help to find the emotional core of those memories, and now I actively did not wish to share them.

The question was: where to start? How many memory-markers would I need to put down? Should I begin at the beginning? "So you're suggesting I'm graceful."

Solas, head tilted, one eyebrow quirked, not quite smiling: "No, I am declaring it. It was not a subject for debate."

No - that moment had been thrilling, but over too quickly. I needed something else. Our first kiss? Would it matter that it had occurred in the Fade? Perhaps the second: "Don't go."

Back already turned, tense, conflicted: "It would be kinder in the long run. But losing you would - " Sound of wordless frustration. Hands at my waist - mouth on mine - but now the words I then disregarded nagged at me. It would be kinder in the long run.

No. Not that one, either.

Forward a little more, then.

And then I had it.

Dahn'direlan: Literally "one who punches bees." Implies someone solves their problems in ways both inefficient and likely to result in considerable harm. It's like an insult tailor-made for Solas.