Chapter 1. The Aftermath and The Afterparty
Solas looked heartbroken at the sight of the orb, destroyed after the battle with Corypheus. Lavellan frowned at his words and only turned away at the sound of the others calling for her. Cassandra was the first to get to the stairs, dirt and grit dusting her hair. The sky was healed; the only remnants of the giant fracture were flickering aurora lights dancing across the expanse. "Inquisitor? Are you alive?" Cassandra called out before Lavellan stepped into view. The seeker's shoulders sagged as she let out a sigh of relief, "There you are…" She smiled at her friend in earnest. The battle had been hard and they all were coated in a sheen of sweat. The Inquisitor turned back to see that Solas was gone and frowned. Solas had lost much, their people had lost much, when the orb was destroyed – when the Vir Abelasan, the Well of Sorrows, was destroyed. It seemed like it was all too much for him. Lavellan felt her eyes sting and didn't realize she'd been holding her breath. She let a sigh escape her lips. "Perhaps he just needs time…", she thought sympathetically before giving her companions her full attention. Now that Corypheus was defeated there was time to celebrate as well as time to mourn. She noted that maybe Solas would blame her for the orb, and that thought staggered her. "Let's return to Skyhold" she said to her friends with a wavering smile.
Lavellan chewed her lip as her gloved hands held tightly to her mount's harness. The people in her retinue chattered and laughed, their lives feeling leagues lighter and better than only hours before. Her mind was elsewhere. The memories of the past few hours, the past few days, the past few weeks, the past few months – it all nagged at her and forced their way into her thoughts while journeying across the careful narrow paths through the mountains. She had pretended that the end of their relationship, that the hurt Solas left in his wake, was insignificant. Now their battle was concluded, the world saved, and she had no distraction from the plaguing self-doubt.
She recalled her memories from the night it all ended after the Temple of Mythal. Solas had held her to him, his eyes peering deeply into her own. "You are so beautiful…", His words to her were like honeyed poison, sweet and yet they wounded her. She wished that she had seen the end coming. Was their relationship just mutual loneliness with a bonus of physical intimacy? Solas had pulled away from her after their kiss, after revealing the truth of her vallaslin. His words cut through her like a knife, "… I am sorry. I distracted you from your duty. It will never happen again." And yet he still dared call her vhenan. She was shattered, broken, confused, and angry. They had just been sharing a wonderful moment and then just – nothing? Lavellan glared at the snow that fluttered onto her cheeks and eyelashes. When Solas returned to Skyhold she wanted answers.
Celebrations had begun as soon as they returned to Skyhold. The people gathered everywhere with cups in hand sloshing liquid gold: the main hall, the tavern, the stairs, the courtyard. It was a wonder that they had so much liquor on hand. Lavellan tried to suppress a snort of amusement as she imagined rooms stuffed to bursting with kegs of ale. "Maybe that's why we could only host so many dignitaries at a time...", she grinned. The main hall was lively with music and many loud conversations. Lavellan smiled and weaved through the throngs of people, making small-talk and thanking those who helped their victory. She had never received so many hugs, cheek kisses, and hearty slaps on the back in her life. The last slap on the back left her nearly coughing for a breath of air.
A familiar hand waved to catch her attention. Lavellan recovered her composure and smiled in earnest. Varric looked up over his cups and tilted his most recently filled one in her direction. "There you are! I thought maybe you'd run off in all of the commotion.", he said with a chuckle. Lavellan smirked as she observed he clearly had been celebrating quite some time with how red his face was and how he nearly lost his balance as he shifted in his chair.
"You know how I am…", she teased before drawing up a chair beside him. "What will you write of this night in your books? 'The glorious Dalish Inquisitor saved the world and then ran from the afterparty'?"
A servant ran by with a full tray of fresh ale, but not before the Inquisitor snagged a cup for herself with her deft hands. Varric grinned wryly over his cup, "Nah, I think it would be something more like: 'The sassy Dalish Inquisitor saved the world and got sloshed with her friends, the end.' Whatdy'a think?" Lavellan chuckled, "Terrible ending. Someone should really teach you how to write." She said with a wide smile. "And where are all these friends you speak of? I only see a drunk dwarf…" She teased him before she took a swig of her ale. The taste was foul to her elven tongue, but it got the job done just as well as any Dalish moonshine. Varric laughed as she scrunched up her face from the bitter aftertaste.
As if summoned by her words, within minutes she had her familiar group of companions, her friends, joining them with smiles and laughter. All but one, it seemed. More than once she scanned the party for the familiar bald head as the candles melted and the flames grew dimmer. Sera hugged her tightly, tearing Lavellan from her search of the thinning crowd.
"Oi! I can't believe it – we really did it! You did it, I mean! Coryphe-spit got his arse handed to him an' we came out jus' fine in the end!" Sera said and then giggled much too loudly. Lavellan's ears hurt at the volume of her friend's voice. She smiled but it felt more like a grimace as she found her fingers in her ears. Cassandra shot her a sympathetic look.
Sera couldn't stop herself as she climbed a chair and proclaimed, "Here's to Inky saving th' day! And to bees!" She shouted and thrust a half-full cup into the air, spurring on a loud "Hurrah!" that erupted from the many people crowding the hall. Dagna cackled loudly, unmistakable even from a distance because she sounded like a loud seal barking. Sera wobbled and then squealed as she was pulled from the chair with the help of a few of the scouts. Lavellan laughed, "Thank you for saving her from herself." She said quietly to Charter and Harding. They nodded and smiled.
It was easy to be distracted from her nagging thoughts by the party guests and her companions. Dorian noticed her sometimes pained expressions and gave her a comforting smile. He saw an opportunity to rescue his 'favorite Inquisitor'. The mustachioed man turned to the group, "Oh, look at the time! I should be getting to bed for my beauty rest. You'll have to excuse me. It's been delightful." One by one they said their goodnights, though some clearly would be staying up further and drinking on into the early morning hours. "I'll have to remember to thank him tomorrow."
The Inquisitor should have gone straight to bed. Instead, she slipped out of the main hall and into the rotunda. Shutting the door tightly behind her nearly extinguished the noise, making it a dull thrum that she could feel even in the stones beneath her feet. Without the distractions of the celebration, she could finally look for him. The air smelled of paint and plaster, old books, and the musk of Leliana's menagerie of birds and nugs. The rotunda itself was bare except for the almost finished fresco on the wall and the empty desk. Solas wasn't there, but neither were his sparse belongings.
Lavellan felt suddenly uncomfortable and lost; Even though this keep had been her home it felt like she was standing in an unfamiliar place. It felt as if she was plunged into an icy river. A cold sweat trickled down her spine. "How could he? He couldn't just leave…" she felt a nausea as bile rose in her throat. Her hands grasped at the wall to steady herself. The anchor crackled painfully as the green light sparked in her left hand.
She wanted to be angry, but instead she felt naked and stripped of her sense of self. Lavellan had been tough, she had to be to survive this long both in the Dales and in the Inquisition. Life hadn't been easy for her. She was a stubborn child and constantly got into trouble. With no siblings and an overwhelmed father, she was more than a handful. She didn't want to be a scared rabbit, which the shemlens had yelled at her while pelting spoiled food at their clan members when she was a small child. They had scared her and the idea of them hurting her people weighed on her heavily as she grew up. Not every human she interacted with was a monster, but those that came after Clan Lavellan were not there to make conversation.
These humans were usually drunk villagers or angry lords' men on horseback. There were the occasional darkspawn. She had earned her fair share of scars fighting for the safety of her people or herself. One prominent scar could be attributed to her foolishness as a youth. She had been nocking arrows and firing into the forest, confident in her abilities as a child. She did not notice a Sylvan while retrieving her arrow. The adolescent Lavellan tripped over its roots, waking it. She had screamed and scrambled away. In her fear, she'd run into another tree – one that luckily wasn't sentient – and sliced her cheek on the rough bark. The blood had dripped into her eyes and she'd cried all the way back home to the safety of the aravels and the scent of halla. It had been an eye-opening experience that made her feel such shame at her supposed strength. Lavellan learned that she had much training and efforts to be truly strong. She dedicated herself to learning as much as she could from her elders and the hunters of their clan.
She questioned everything since she could first speak, asking why enough that her elders were very glad when she spent more time in the forest than in the camps or the aravels. The Keeper had not enjoyed her nitpicking at his guidance, words of wisdom, and history of their people. As a teenager she'd nearly been exiled for her antics – Sera reminded her much of herself when she was younger.
She wasn't the most popular elf in her clan, in fact a lot of the others thought she was just a little weird, a little off. Lavellan had not worshipped like the others, in awe of gods she could not see nor hear. She had loved the stories of the gods as if they were fairytales, especially the tragic ones. No, she had looked to the statues of the elven gods with questioning eyes and doubt. If they were so powerful, why were they outwitted and defeated so easily? She never cowered with fear in front of the statues of Fen'Harel, though she had a healthy respect for him. She would stare at his statues and wonder, How did you trick them? She wanted to learn from the mistakes of the gods and the mistakes of their ancestors. She never wanted to fall prey to someone, to be outwitted, or outclassed in strength or skill. As she got older, she played a role of the dutiful elf more than she let her true self show. She was looking for an escape from the life of the clan, she was bored and dreamt of something more. She dreamt that had some sort of destiny that she had yet to realize.
She learned to be crafty, to be stealthy, to be invisible in battle. Lavellan had grown into a fierce woman with skills honed over thousands of hours of practice. She considered herself strong and had never relied on anyone before she met her friends, before Corypheus and the orb had marked her. She had felt affection, attachment, and love, if the love of a teenager or young adult was truly love.
With Solas she had felt something so much more, a word like love couldn't describe it. She had felt whole with him. He was her vhenan and she was his. And now he was gone. It felt as if the world had been torn asunder under her very feet. A wave of nausea nearly knocked her down.
Reality seemed to warp as her vision spun until she pressed her face to the cold bricks of the wall. The brickwork was lit with the eerie glow of the green radiating from her mark. The rotunda seemed to spin around her with the frescoes a blur of color. Panic. She felt like it was overwhelming her. It was so foreign in the calm quiet of the rotunda that she choked back a laugh. It sounded more like a sob. She swallowed back bile. Her legs felt like they were stuck in mud as they threatened to collapse and pitch her into the floor. She stumbled across the room. "Air!" Her pulse raced and her head pounded. Running, she threw open the exterior door. Lavellan gasped in a deep lungful of brisk mountain air.
It was cold; Skyhold was always chilled at even at warmest times of day. The air cut through her like a knife. She then promptly heaved her upper body over the banister and vomited into the bushes below. After a minute, her stomach was emptied and all she could bring up was spit. Lavellan let herself slide down onto the stonework and cry. She couldn't fathom what she'd done to wrong him, to turn him away from her, to chase him off. Did she see something more to their relationship? Did she fool herself into believing he truly loved her the way she loved him? Plenty of men would whisper sweet nothings to bed a woman. Her head dipped and she pulled her knees up to chest. Tears fell in heavy streams. She hiccupped and sobbed and wished he'd come back to her. After a time, her eyes were red and her lips and nose raw.
Perhaps if he had witnessed such a scene, Varric would write: The Dalish Inquisitor vanquished the blighted Tevinter Magister and then broke down sobbing over her former lover, the apostate hobo elf named Solas.