My brain: Everyone loves loves in-depth dissections of Elvish words and phrases for subtle foreshadowing! Right? Right?!

Build and Grow

I turned to glance at Solas, walking beside me, his arm linked through mine. We had left the rest of the scouts behind at his insistence. Whatever this was that he was directing us towards, he wanted to show me first.

Presuming, of course, I was able to see it - which was presuming a lot.

"What is this place, exactly?" I asked, unable to hold the question back any longer. Solas had seemed so pleased the last few days that I hadn't been able to bring myself to question him too closely. Clearly he relished the chance to surprise us - to surprise me - with whatever remained of this memory of a place he had found within the Fade.

We had been traversing the Frostbacks for over a week now, and, in the heights we scaled, winter had already closed in. Still, there was some game of the smaller variety, and forage in the form of roots, nuts, and cattail shoots, if one knew where to look.

I did.

For stores, the Inquisition mostly had bags upon bags of flour and grain, taken from a storehouse at the back of Haven, left entirely untouched in the assault on the village. That was all very well - the grain fed both people and animals, and we could make bread for months. Other provisions were in short supply, though - a single barrel of salted pork, another of salted fish, and the jerked venison and beef soldiers habitually carried as part of their kits comprised all the preserved meat we had with us. The storehouse had luckily contained a few barrels of cider that apparently hadn't fit in the storeroom attached to Haven's tavern, a few bags of apples waiting to be made into cider, and some fruit leather that had simply been misplaced somehow or other. Everyone received a ration of fruit each morning along with the breakfast bread, and then a judicious portion of cider before turning in at night. The last thing we needed was for our people to begin succumbing to scurvy.

For the rest, we ate a lot of bread, because it was what we could make. At night we made stew with whatever game had been caught, chopping up meat and bones alike and tossing them into the pot, augmented with roots, crushed nuts, and any other edible vegetation we had managed to find, thickened with a little grain and another generous portion of flour. It was filling, if not precisely satisfying, especially as the days wore on and our relatively unvaried diet began to take its inevitable toll. But no one was starving or finding they couldn't carry on with their duties, and the wounded who hadn't died within the first handful of days were, on the whole, steadily improving. We might have made it through most of the winter on such rations, even if they were uninspiring.

Thankfully, it didn't look like we would have to.

I wrenched my attention back to Solas as he began to answer my question following a measured, thoughtful silence: "This is a place where the Inquisition can build and grow - a place waiting for a force to hold it."

Solas and I had stolen a few brief moments together over the last days, usually filled with heated kisses that we, in unspoken agreement, halted before they could go further. Not only did we have duties, not only was everything - as Solas had reminded me - precarious for two apostate elves at the center of a human-dominated crisis, but touching him and feeling his emotions wash over me brought up emotions of my own that I had no time - or inclination - to entertain and pick apart. Little as I wanted to admit it, I was still shaken by what had happened at Haven - and what had happened after, too. All I could do - all I had time or energy to do - was put it aside and hope that time, change of place, and falling into a new routine eventually settled what was currently unsettled.

I noticed the spells - wards - before we even crested the ridge we climbed. They were immense and so convoluted that I knew, somehow, they had to be ancient. They were also...familiar, in much the same way Corypheus's stolen focus had been familiar, and by that token I assumed they were also elven.

The ground beneath our feet evened out, and I knew we had reached the top of the ridge. The valley ahead was, I thought, immense, based on both the way sound reverberated and the depth of smeared shadows that lay below. "What do you see?" Solas asked, his breath tickling my ear.

Though the mountain peaks were little more than a blur whose pale tops faded seamlessly into the sky, ahead I could make out a patch of darker grey that I knew, based on the wards ringing it, had to be something other than another, strangely bare, peak. Biting my lip, I squinted, trying to resolve the blur into something discernible while I reached out with my mage-senses to metaphorically run my hands over the spells, trying to take in their shape.

"Walls," I said haltingly. "Welcome - for us, anyway. The Veil is so - so complete here, and yet...all these enchantments are bound into it as if someone crafted all of it in concert." I pulled a small spell across the Veil, smiling as a flame lit easily in my palm. Usually fire was my worst element. "It's like the Fade flows into the waking world through carefully-directed channels - sluices, maybe. Magic is so easy here, but, at the same time, demons are unwelcome." I closed my eyes, shutting out the blur of the mountains, and felt for the intent the Fade would illuminate. "A fortress," I said at last. "The stone was cut and fitted with so much love that it...stands, defiant against the wearing of time."

Solas's arm slipped around my waist. "You see very clearly," he told me. "Welcome to Tarasyl'an Te'las - Skyhold, in the common tongue."

I tried to work out the translation for myself. Tarasyl'an - sky-place, that was simple enough. Te'las - that was more difficult. Las meant so many things - hope and ambition, anticipation and intent. Te put it into the negative, however. The possible meanings curled around me - despair and sundering, repulsion and...flexibility? A bending, turning aside, remaking - reorienting? Then again, the suffix -an could both mean "place" and denote a possessive. I supposed a very extreme - and fanciful - translation might be something like Place of the Sky's Despair.

"Skyhold" seemed to me such a limited translation as to be deceptive. Perhaps that was precisely what Solas intended.

"This - this place is one of the foundations of the world, isn't it," I said, not quite certain what I meant by that, but entirely certain it was true. Whatever configuration the stones and boards had been arranged in, the place preceded it - back and back, so ancient, so tied into what was , that no one could hope to untangle them.

"In a sense," Solas said with careful precision, "it may be called the foundation of this world."

I had no need of the shivas'lath to know there was so much he wasn't telling me.

I turned to look at him, wondering if I should demand a more complete explanation - but, again, my position near the heart of a human organization stopped me. Whatever doubts he harbored, I couldn't fault them. I was no Leliana, able to mask everything I thought and felt. There were pieces of information I could refuse to divulge, but there could be danger inherent in simply allowing someone - especially someone like Leliana - to know a piece of information existed. The Inquisition had given me so much, but it was filled with humans, and, historically, humans had taken everything from my people.

I settled for a look that I hoped communicated that I knew he wasn't telling me even half of everything, and returned my attention to the fortress. "Will you take me down and give me a tour?" I asked.

"More accurate to say we will explore together, given its age and the shifting nature of the Fade, but - yes, I will," he replied, threading my arm through his again before we began making our careful way down into the valley before us.

It was a long trek, but there was no particular rush - Solas had directed the scouts to make camp in a shallow cave a little back from the ridge where he had led me to take my first look at Skyhold. As long as we returned by nightfall, they wouldn't worry.

For all that the fortress had resisted the passage of time, it was still in rough shape - a fact I could discern with an unusual degree of clarity thanks to the oddities worked into the Veil within its confines. It wasn't like Redcliffe, where my sight was practically normal, but the Fade shone through brightly enough to keep me from tripping over debris at my feet, giving me the ability to move about far more freely than I usually could. And mana - mana was really no problem here. I could keep up any spell indefinitely, as long as I could retain my focus.

We didn't spend a long time within Skyhold itself, conscious of the need to make it back to the camp before dark, but it was long enough for me to see that it would suit the Inquisition perfectly. The area it encompassed was perhaps twice the size of Haven, but that didn't take into account the many rooms piled atop each other within both the keep and the guard towers surrounding it. We would all fit, with room - as Solas had said - to grow.

The next day, Solas and I led the rest of the scouts to the fortress, and half of them remained there with me to begin setting up temporary shelters for our people, while Solas returned with the rest to lead our company here. There was too much to be done to repair the keep itself for five scouts and one mage to make any kind of start on it, so instead we set up tents, taking advantage of the fact that we had walls we could make use of. Canvas and leather became a means of completing structures rather than building them, giving the camp we set an air of semi-permanence - not unlike a Dalish winter camp. More scouts arrived daily, bringing more supplies so we would be ready to house and feed everyone when the rest of our company arrived.

When the temporary quarters were as comfortable as we could make them, I sent the scouts into the valley to hunt and gather anything edible. They returned with word of a ruined village at the base of the peak, surrounded by orchards and signs of agriculture left to grow wild. There were few apples and nuts left so late in the season - and the apples were small and sour, the trees not having been tended in generations - but enough to make seeking them out worthwhile. The apples I tossed in the soup pot with everything else, and by the time they had cooked down, their deficiencies weren't noticeable. When I set the scouts digging for root vegetables, they found a number of squirrel caches in addition to a fair number of potatoes. So that was something.

Game was unusually plentiful, as well. So many sources of food concentrated in such a small area meant that it could support an unusual number of animals, and many of them seemed content to remain much later into the cold seasons than they otherwise would have. Rabbits and squirrels, and perhaps some pigeons, I had expected. Deer were a welcome surprise. Our hunters were successful enough that we built a makeshift smokery to begin preserving the excess meat.

By the time everyone else began arriving four days later, we were in a good place. Skyhold itself had surprises for us, too. One effect of the wards was that the temperature within the fortress was noticeably warmer than that beyond the gates. We received less than half the snow that similar elevations got, and it didn't usually last for more than a day or two on the ground.

That was within the courtyard. There was a second walled-off space, now overgrown with vegetation, that had evidently been cultivated as a kitchen garden. It was even warmer than the courtyard - snow never seemed to fall there. There was too much to cut back for my scouts to work on it when the valley was a better prospect for both game and forage, but once additional personnel began arriving, I set them to clearing out the garden. Within, we found beds growing lettuce, carrots, potatoes, onions - too many things to list. Grapes were trained along several walls, and there were both apple and plum trees. Most of the vegetation was in a less-than-ideal state - as in the valley, the trees hadn't been tended in far too long, and the same went for the grape vines. The lettuce had long gone to seed, leaving the leaves bitter. The carrots were similarly bitter, and tough, as well.

Even so, bitterness didn't make any of it any less edible - just less palatable - and toughness could eventually be boiled away. I had everything harvested, and collected any seeds that could be salvaged. We weren't organizing a farming community, and I had little doubt that most of our food would come from merchants, but it never hurt to grow what we could.

I was busy - I kept myself busy - and didn't take any time to think. There was something comforting about focusing on subsistence, like slipping back into childhood, and so I let myself be comforted and didn't look forward too far.

Solas arrived with the remaining wounded on the fifth day, and the rest of the Inquisition's leadership with the rearguard on the sixth. By then we were humming along efficiently, tasks placed into hands capable of accomplishing them, and I was only being bothered with minor emergencies a handful of times each day. It meant I could use my magic to pitch in wherever it was needed, and I did, whether that meant helping the healers or organizing the pantries.

There was always something magic could help with, and that was good. It kept me busy. It kept me focused.

Though I made it a point to have a brief word with each of my companions when they arrived - except for Solas, with whom I shared a brief kiss - I was too busy to see much of them. Solas was not precisely pleased by this, and I could see Varric, Dorian, and Bull disapproved as well, but none of them managed to corner me during the day, and no one tried to get between me and my bedroll at night. Probably wise - I was generally so tired by the time I sought my tent that I would have drop-kicked through the Fade anyone attempting to keep me awake.

No one managed to corner me, that is, until the morning I woke in the pre-dawn light to the Iron Bull's hand on my shoulder.