Solas and Dorian were exiting the rotunda when it happened. So deep in discussion over one of the books that had come in on loan, they nearly missed it.
It was a long, low, sound that rose from up from a rumbling growl to a guttural screech as it rippled through the hall. Lasting just a few seconds before falling quiet.
More noise than voice, Solas at first mistook it for one of the scaffolds on the battlements collapsing. Or the grating of metal over stone. It gave him brief pause, stilling with his hand against the open door, mid-step, mid-word. He exchanged a puzzled look with Dorian before they glanced across the hall, where the sound had come. But nothing seemed amiss. A few other workers had taken notice — there was a frown and a scatter of lifted faces — but when nothing followed they shrugged and returned to their tasks. He, too, turned back to Dorian, the reply still ready on his tongue, only to lose the chance a second time when the door to the war room burst open.
Ellana stumbled out, her face drawn and sickly pale with a hand held loosely to her mouth. With eyes wide — but unseeing — she tripped over her feet, fell into a table and knocked over a bowl, righted herself, then ran out the open doors into the yard. As she disappeared down the steps Cullen jogged out behind her clutching an unsealed scroll, but by the time he made it into the hall she was already gone.
Solas met him at the threshold. "What was that?"
For a long moment Cullen didn't reply, but stood staring at the doors, seemingly unaware he'd been spoken to at all.
"Commander?"
The second attempt cut through the daze. Cullen glanced down at his hand, at the parchment, and grimaced as though it pained him to see it there. Shaking his head, he managed only a quiet, "We failed. Her clan, they…" before trailing into silence.
He held out the missive for Solas to take.
While not normally privy to what went on in the war room, he did not hesitate to accept the offering. Quickly unrolled and flit his eyes back and forth across the scroll looking for key information. It was a report following the conflict between clan Lavellan and Wycome's people. Not sensitive per se, but details that weren't known outside of the Inquisitor's most trusted circle. Last he'd heard they were sending a troop of soldiers to protect the Dalish following accusations they were responsible for some sort of plague in the city.
He stopped cold on the words, 'entirely destroyed'.
And all at once understood what he'd heard: an anguished wail of terrible grief.
The scroll slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor as he turned and ran. Exiting the hall just in time to see Ellana nearly run down a group of soldiers as she fled Skyhold on horseback.
Taking the steps two at a time he reached the yard before she got across the bridge, but lost sight of her when he stopped to negotiate with a returning patrol for use of one of their horses. Still, it was faster than the stables, and he was out the gate and after her in moments.
She rode hard and recklessly, there was no hope of catching up until she stopped on her own accord. Or her horse grew weary of the breakneck pace. Instead, he focused on the distant sound of hoofbeats and the winding trail of muddy tracks that acted as his guide.
He finally found her she was half-way down the first flight of mountain steps, waylaid trying to force her horse to ride on. They'd stalled before a particularly treacherous stretch of road where mounts were always led on foot, never ridden. Considerable effort had gone into teaching them to traverse it safely: it would not defy its training. Each time she snapped the reins the horse would rear up and screech, kicking in protest.
It would break its legs to obey her — and she'd never been cruel.
Still, lost to the thrall of anger, she was kicking her heels into its sides. Demanding its submission and growing more frustrated as it continued to disobey her.
By the time Solas came to a stop and slid off his own horse he was joining her on the ground. Having given up on strong-arming the animal into injury or death she'd opted to abandon it and take off on foot, come what may. No thought for the peril she'd put herself in. She carried nothing: no weapons, no armour, no supplies… Not even a coat. There was nowhere to go.
This was not running away.
Just running.
"Ellana!" he called.
She spun around wearing an expression more wild and terrified than he'd ever seen. Wan, unsteady, and with gnarled fingers curled into sharp angles, she pulled at her hair and choked on sounds she couldn't quite make into words. Shaking her head in helpless denial.
He raised both hands — holding them apart in a gesture of invitation — and took several careful steps toward her. "Vhenan."
The endearment struck like an arrow to the heart. It cut her down: not into his arms, but to her knees.
And there, she screamed.
Mindlessly. Horribly. Loud enough to echo through the mountains and ring through the trees. She drew the sound up from the deepest pit of her stomach — where only pain lived. Nightmares carved by the fears of a motherless child left to die on a cold, muddy, road. She wrapped her arms around herself and crumpled, tipping forward, gripping her shoulders so hard that the seams of her sleeves began to fray.
She screamed for rage, for regret, and for fathomless grief.
She screamed until her voice gave out, and the only sounds she could make were thin, brittle, whispers.
Then sobbed, head in hands, like the little girl she'd been. Terrified and alone. Lost and broken-hearted. She pushed the heels of her palms into her eyes and grit her teeth to bear the pain of once more finding herself in the vale of death.
Solas kneeled in the mud with her, sliding his arms around her shoulders to draw her close. But she was too raw, and fought against him. Pounded on his shoulders and tore at his clothes. Pushing, clawing, and ripping her nails on the buckles in her rage.
But when he whispered, "I'm so sorry," all she could do was wail.
After all the fight in her had died, she fell limp, and Solas could finally pull her in and hold her to his heart. Tighter than she could bear, as if to press his own life into her to replace the ones she'd lost. He rocked her like he rocked their children; helpless babes in a world too big and too full of things they did not yet understand. Here, now, she was not so different.
They stayed embraced on the road long enough that the mud they kneeled in began to cake to the knees of their pants. The cold sink into their skin. When she had the wherewithal to notice, it frightened her, and Ellana pulled away from the sodden patch she'd left on Solas' shirt to frantically claw at the muck. But it only spread the mess, and once it began to stick between her fingers she was up on her feet. Confusion bleeding into alarm. Then mania. She was hyperventilating.
Solas tried to catch her shoulders — to still her — but she twisted away. "Ellana, stop." He grabbed hold of her wrists. Pulled her back. "Stop. You're going to hurt yourself."
She was still spinning from shock. Scrambling for something to ground her and flailing in the dark.
When she could not run, she fought.
"You could have done something!" she screamed at him, and yanked her arms back. It freed one wrist, but his hold was too firm on the other. He tightened his grip, determined not to lose her to hysteria. "You could have sent your people to stop it! To protect them! You could have learned something! Anything!"
"This is not your fault."
There, a crack in her armour.
She grimaced. "You can't say that for certain!"
With all the sincerity he could muster, "I can," he replied. "Both as your lover, and as an advisor. You could not have known this would happen. Wycome's soldiers were exposed to red lyrium for months — they were not in their right minds — the fighting had grown crazed by the time a retreat was called. Had the Inquisition pushed on they'd have all been slaughtered, too. A senseless waste of life. We cannot reverse the effects of red lyrium, just as we cannot cure the Taint, there is nothing you could have done to prevent Wycome's descent into madness. No one has that power."
Another fracture — with a sob this time.
"There has to be something."
He was firmer, now. She was listening. "You do not have that power, Ellana. There is nothing you could have done to spare them."
It reached her by inches; he could track it in the slow fall of her shoulders. The crumble from righteous fury into deep sorrow. When the last shreds of her resistance fell away it took only a gentle pull on her wrist to sweep her into his arms again. This time she did not struggle against the embrace.
She buried her face in his chest, hooked her fingers into the weave of his sweater, and grieved. For everything she'd lost. Not just her clan, her Keeper, and community… but the life she'd had before them.
Back at Skyhold, in her writing desk, sat the draft of a letter to her Keeper. She'd shown it to Solas just days earlier. A request of the clan's elders to collect what living memory still existed of where she'd been found as a child and when she was first taken in. It was to be the first step of a greater endeavour: the attempt to locate her birthplace, where her parents had been fleeing too, and if there was anyone left who may have known them.
With the death of her clan also went the last hope of ever finding those answers.
That night she set an altar in the tower.
From their shared bed Solas watched as she pulled an old leather satchel from a drawer. Something he'd not seen in some time, and thought long lost. She retrieved two sticks of incense, some polished stones, and a few carved trinkets. After lighting the incense on a candle she arranged it all around a bowl of water placed just beyond the threshold of her balcony door.
There, she kneeled, dipped her fingers in the bowl, and began to pray.
It was not any litany he knew. Though the words were Elvish, she leaned heavily into the Dalish brogue that'd softened in her years apart from them. What little he could understand was not at all familiar.
He'd not seen her pray in years. Not since Haven, back when she spent most afternoons wandering the forest outside the settlement. He'd often find her on her knees in the snow, beseeching the ghosts of Gods for patience to guide through her trials. More for the comfort the motions brought her than for any hope of being heard, he'd thought. Even these small acts of worship strengthened her spirit; she was in a foreign land, with foreign people, and tried not to stray too far from her roots.
Over time these devotions waned. Eventually they stopped entirely. Even before he'd told her everything she'd begun to turn away from her Gods. Her faith had been tested, and did not survive intact. She was someone new now — the Herald, the Inquisitor — and it was simply too far from what she used to be.
To see her like this again, now, seemed deeply at odds with the person he knew.
But he said nothing. Only watched in respectful, if curious, silence while he rubbed circles around the back of the little figure curled beside him. Their daughter was difficult most nights, and so was often separated from her brother to ensure he slept soundly while she cried. An hour spent at work and she'd only just begun to drift. He knew her patterns now, and so listened for the little caught breath that heralded her fall into deeper sleep.
Gratefully, it came not long before Ellana finished her ritual. By the time she slid into the other side of the bed they were free to speak without risk of waking either of the babies.
Yet, before he could manage a word, "Don't," Ellana warned him. Her eyes flashed in the dim.
He frowned. "I would not begrudge you prayer in a time of mourning," he said, with meaning. But it was not quite the truth. Grief was complex and its easing ever more so… yet he did wonder how she reconciled the worship of figures she knew to not only be false, but monstrous.
Somehow, she'd seen that in him.
"I said don't."
He lifted a hand to indicate his surrender and she released the breath she'd held in anticipation of a fight. Offering just one final, hard, look before turning onto her back — shutting him out entirely.
It was not the first time, nor would it be the last; even before they were lovers he knew well her predilections toward avoidance. But as her lover it pained him to see her choose it. She would sooner sentence herself to grieve alone than risk letting someone into that tender space to hold her. Loneliness was too familiar; it had become a comfort.
Something he, too, understood.
He could hear her thinking in the quiet. Those slow, deep, breaths she worked so hard to keep even would break with a hitch every now and then. Betraying cracks to the dark. She'd find no peace tonight. Rather than reach for him she'd remain in exile… so he reached for her instead.
Gently — so delicately — his fingers stretched across the gulf and touched her bare shoulder. There, he waited. It was neither push nor ask — he offered only the option for her to turn, should she wish it. Laid with the thin hope that their love could provide her the strength to take those first, terrifying, steps out from cover.
Two moments more — another deep, steeling, breath — and she did.
"Dorian and I were talking the other day about Redcliffe," she said quietly. "About the future we were sent to…"
It was not normally a topic she broached with him. With anyone. Years had passed since the events and still he knew very little of what actually transpired. It had always been too sore a wound to touch.
"The people we talked to when we arrived in the future — Leliana, you — they'd not seen either of us for over a year. From their point of view we had just disappeared without a trace, right there in front of them, like we'd never existed at all. Only a second passed for us in transit but for them we were gone long enough for the whole world to wither and die and forget about us. But we weren't just… standing around watching it all. We weren't there at all, because we didn't belong to it. That world wasn't ours.
"We were removed from all reality, all time, and then dropped into another at a random point. Appearing in that doomed future with no origin or direction… just existing in those hours. Just long enough to destroy it. And then gone again — poof."
She did not look at him while she talked, but her eyes tracked a fingers' path along a chubby arm, up over a shoulder, to their daughter's feathered crown where she could play with the ring of curls there. She tucked one behind a pointed ear with the same care Solas showed when he did it to her.
"I still feel like that sometimes. As though I've just been dropped into this — this time, this world — with no beginning or end. Maybe that's why I have no origin. And I wonder if, when it's all over, will anyone remember me as I am? As I was, before any of this? Did I ever really exist here at all, or will it end one day and I just… disappear like in Redcliffe? Moved to something else, somewhere else. Because I never belonged to this place, either. Maybe my world was at home with the Clan, or with my parents, wherever they were headed. I was plucked out of that time — where I should have died twice over — and put here by accident. Now I'm just drifting."
She finally met his eyes. The sadness in them was heavy and raw, but more than that it was the fear that struck him. This had become real for her.
He touched a hand to hers, lightly. "I will always remember you as you are."
But the words did not quite have the effect he'd intended. Rather than comforted, she looked all the more hurt by the attempt.
"But you won't remember where I came from. And now, no one ever will."
He had no words to ease that pain.
And he would not pay her the insult of trying with some pithy adage about time and healing. The grief was still too near… and he too weak to find her any answers that might let her live with its scar. Hope alone could not rewrite her story; a wish would not mend its missing pages.
So he gave her only what he could: sliding a hand along her jaw to gently cradle it, tipping her chin up until their eyes met again. Tears pooled in his palm as he pressed his lips to her forehead, and there he held her dear until she'd cried the last.
And fell into blessed, dreamless, sleep.