Mine Eyes Have Seen

by NeedAMuse

Inana Lavellan can't see most things - not in the waking world, anyway. The Fade is another matter, shining like a beacon just beyond the Veil. Imagine her surprise when a "spirit" she has known in the Fade since childhood appears in the waking world as a man calling himself Solas.

24. Solas Samples Hope

Solas POV, in case it wasn't clear from the title and the length. 25 will go up in a few minutes.

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Solas Sample Hope

The avalanche rumbled down the slopes and Solas froze in place, waiting for the untethered end of the shivas'lath to snap back on him, wondering just how terribly he would be wounded by the magic. It was, after all, easier than wondering how terribly he would be wounded by the loss of someone he respected. Cared for. Cared for… deeply.

A breath passed. Two. Three.

"Do you think there is any chance she made it?" Dorian asked from several paces away, where he, too, had stopped.

Solas found he was breathing shallowly now - swiftly. In the valley below, the avalanche had already swamped Haven, and yet the shining thread of the shivas'lath remained. "I...do," Solas answered the other mage, hope a soft, flickering flame within him. This was eerily like the moment in Redcliffe when Inana had, briefly, disappeared, and he had braced for the backlash of the magic binding them - only for her to reappear moments later. Somehow, even across time, into a future that was never to be, still the shivas'lath had endured, and he had never been forced to believe for a single moment that she was truly gone.

"Do you think," Dorian said more quietly, "there is any chance she will make it out of whatever hiding spot she might have managed to cram herself into?"

The breath again froze in Solas's chest. "I don't know," he admitted - because that was an entirely separate question, wasn't it? The shivas'lath might connect him to Inana, but he - incurable fool that he was - had urged her to avoid strengthening it. If it were stronger, he would have known what she felt now - whether she was conscious or not, whether she was wounded…whether she was trapped. Were it fully realized, he would have been able to follow the bond to her. "Fenedhis," he swore savagely. "Dorian, find Varric and Sera. She is alive and we have to go back for her before she suffocates or freezes to death."

Dorian opened his mouth, and then paused. "All right, I'm not voicing any of my questions right now, but I want to make it very clear that I have them, and that I expect you to pay up later."

And with that, he turned and went to seek out the two archers.