This one is going to hurt.

As She Fades

In spite of the darkness and the danger of the trenches the Imperial armies had placed haphazardly across the land, we went mounted - Solas, Cassandra, and I, with Cole riding behind me on Sylalhan. Cassandra directed her questions about Wisdom to me, thankfully. Solas was clearly trying not to snap at us, but he was in a near-frenzy of fear and the kindest thing any of us could do for him was leave him alone. Cole hid his face against my shoulder, his silence broken only by the occasional whimper. I had second - and third - thoughts about bringing him, given his fear of being bound, but he had begged to come and I hadn't been able to deny him. At best, I hoped he would have insights that might help us save Wisdom. At worst…well, Solas might be desperately in need of Compassion should the worst come to pass.

We would have missed the bodies had Sylalhan not slowed, snorting, to circle the sad mound of corpses, robbed of all valuables and casually cast aside without even a proper pyre. "A mage's staff," Cassandra said quietly. "Look."

"The Freemen don't want mages, especially not rebels," Cole whispered into my shoulder. "No mages and no elves but those that serve them - little lordlings leading lands drowning in death."

I swallowed and called down enough fire to consume the remains while Cassandra whispered a prayer. It didn't seem wise to leave them in that state when so many of the dead were rising. Then we went on.

"Oh no," I breathed as we came to the last hill that separated us from the battle ahead. There were six mages and a number of non-mage auras - perhaps as many as ten. But what shone out, clear as the sun, was the pride demon that was all that remained of Wisdom.

"What?" Solas demanded tightly.

"They have corrupted her," I told him in a small voice.

Tears pricked my eyes as his agony rippled through our bond.

"No," he half-sobbed, his voice cracking repeatedly as he continued trying to deny the terrible reality: "No, no, no!" He kicked his horse into a canter, cresting the top of the hill where he stopped to survey the battle. His horse clearly felt his tension and danced in place, eager to rush forward, but Solas kept it - and himself - under control, if only barely. Sylalhan followed close behind, needing no prompting from me. The sun was just rising, and the morning light was beautiful. I couldn't see its effect on the battlefield, but it drenched me in a honey-colored warmth that made an ironic counterpoint to the shouts of dismay below.

While I couldn't make out the battle field , the battle itself was clear at a single glance: mages on one side, Freemen on the other, with the demon lashing out at both sides indiscriminately, though the mages clearly had more experience keeping clear of demons. So far all the losses from the demon appeared to be among the Freemen. It leveled attacks at the mages frequently, but had yet to catch any of them.

Ah - no, I was mistaken, I realized. The bindings they had placed on it still held. It would break free given enough time, and would then lay waste to the mages precisely as it did the Freemen, but for the moment they were still safe. They weren't dodging its attacks, it was unable to see them through.

"What should we do?" Cassandra asked.

Horror at whatever he saw below seemed to have frozen Solas in place. "The - the bindings - " he choked.

I nodded, realizing what he meant. "If we break the bindings quickly, enough of Wisdom may remain to return to what she was - or at least near enough what she was that there will no longer be a demon to fight."

"And if it turns out after the fact that we weren't quick enough…?" the Seeker asked.

"Then Wisdom is lost, and we have a demon to fight," I replied.

"A tragedy, I understand, and yet still far from the worst of our worst-case scenarios," she sighed. "Very well - let us break the binding."

"First we need to clear away the Freemen," I said, "but I don't think we should get in close. Solas, you and I can attack from here. Afterward, Cassandra will hold off the mages, Cole will distract the demon, and you and I will unravel the bindings. Any objections?"

There were none.

The Freemen seemed to think that the mages had somehow called for reinforcements. Between the demon and the spells Solas and I directed at them, they broke quickly, sounding a retreat. "I wish we had someone to watch them and make sure they don't regroup," I muttered as Cole took my arm and led me down the hill after Solas.

"Thom would have done it," Cole said quietly. "Going after bandits made him feel like he was helping."

"Do you also wish he was here, or are you just picking up on my feelings?" I asked the spirit.

His enormous blue eyes blinked back at me from under his unruly fringe of hair. "He only ever wanted to help."

That was answer enough, I supposed.

As it happened, we didn't need Cassandra to keep the mages from attacking us. They approached us with no signs of hostility. "You're not with the bandits," one particularly quick fellow observed. "You're mages! You can help us fight off the demon!"

Solas paused in his march, and Cole and I stopped beside him. "We are not here to help you," he snarled, drawing himself up to his full height and managing to look down his nose at the human, though I assumed the man was taller than he was. Solas might be tall for an elf, but he was on the shorter side for a human man.

"You bound Wisdom and corrupted her into a demon," I told the man sternly as a woman limped up behind him - I saw her aura and heard her uneven footsteps. "You may very well have murdered an ancient and powerful spirit with your fumbling."

"Murdered!" the fool exclaimed, deeply offended by the charge. "As though a demon could be murdered. Unlike you," his tone added you Dalish savage, even though he didn't put the thought into words, "I have studied such creatures. I was the foremost expert on demons in Kirkwall - "

"Be silent, pompous imbecile," Solas spat, "before I do the world a service and remove your tongue!"

"Do not deign to explain spirits to those of us not beholden to your foolish Circle teachings, shemlen," I advised him, my temper not under much better control than Solas's - probably in part because I was sharing in Solas's anger. I took a breath as Cole slipped his hand into mine and squeezed reassuringly. "As long as you refrain from interfering," I told them, my voice tight but calm again, "we will judge your crimes after seeing what becomes of Wisdom. I would prefer not to be forced to kill you, but we have no time to waste and will do whatever is necessary to free this spirit from her enslavement."

"Enslavement!" the fool sputtered, though Solas, Cole, and I were already turning away.

"William, hush," the limping woman advised in a low voice. "You saw how they drove away the bandits. We are injured and nearly out of potions - we have no hope of standing against them."

"Seeker Pentaghast will have charge of you until I have attention to spare," I tossed back over my shoulder, unable to avoid a certain amount of satisfaction as I heard twin gasps of dismay from the mages. I had gathered a few things about the arrangement of Circles in my time with the Inquisition. One of them was that most mages saw Seekers as some sort of ultra-powerful templar, rather than as a separate force meant to have oversight of the templars. Not that I had known any better before meeting Cassandra; truth be told, I had never even heard of the Seekers prior to our introduction.

"She loses more of herself every moment," Cole said, his voice anguished. "Hurry!" And with that admonition, he leapt at the demon.

"I'll take this side," I told Solas. He could cover ground faster than I could, so it would be best if I took the nearer side.

I spent a moment studying the binding, trying to decide how to most quickly release it. I could destroy the pillars the mages had erected to mark off the circle, but doing so without releasing or siphoning off some of the power would cause a backlash. Not deadly, but I couldn't afford to be stunned - and it would be even worse if some of it found an outlet in what remained of Wisdom. I didn't know precisely what it would do to her, but I couldn't imagine it would be helpful in keeping pieces of her intact.

I glanced toward Solas - but he was picking apart the binding with the kind of meticulous care that likely required decades of practice to hone. My skill was simply lacking. I was too inexperienced.

It wasn't, I decided after another moment of studying it, a particularly good spell. Either desperation or unfamiliarity with blood magic had made its caster careless. I found a loose "end" and tugged at it gently, grimacing at the taste of blood and pain in my mouth. The power came more easily than I had expected, draining eagerly into the Anchor, which sparked in response. Well - that likely wasn't good, but it was helpful now. I pulled out enough that I could safely destroy the pillar, and then cut off the stream of power with a sharp jerk.

The Anchor released it only reluctantly, but it did release.

That was when the demon took a swipe at me. Cole intercepted in time, but I put up a hasty barrier on us both, cursing myself for not thinking of it earlier. It was precisely the sort of reckless disregard for my safety that Solas worried about -

And then it occurred to me to wonder if Solas had remembered to put up a barrier.

I looked across the space separating us. He hadn't. I couldn't access the energy bound up in my hand other than to release it in an explosive burst of chaos, but some of the power from the spell had come back to me as mana. I used it to cover Solas in - an admittedly weak - barrier as well, and felt his spark of recognition through our bond, followed swiftly by chagrin.

Satisfied that neither of us would forget again, I destroyed my first pillar, and then stumbled my way to the next.

Thanks to the Anchor, I finished a little before Solas did, though by that point my left hand throbbed in a rhythm uncannily like that of a heartbeat - but one not my own. Hopefully he would be able to do something to calm the Anchor when we had a moment, at least if it didn't settle on its own.

Then he broke the final binding - and Wisdom was free.

The demon seemed to collapse in on itself, shrinking as it did so, until only a spirit remained - but the spirit wasn't Wisdom as I had known her in the Fade. Her features were blurred and, rather than appearing as a particularly well-proportioned elven woman, her figure only suggested a woman's curves, appearing mostly androgynous. The color palette she had chosen for herself was gone - her skin, hair, and eyes, as well as the suggestion of clothing she wore, were all faded to the smoky green color of veridium.

Solas rushed to her side, and I drifted nearer - near enough to make out some of his expression, though I hardly needed it with the anguish flowing through our bond. " Lethallan ," he gulped, and then spent a moment searching for words, but finally settled on a simple expression of regret and sympathy: " Ir abelas ."

"Tel'abelas," she replied, and the voice, at least, was recognizable, though the accent was less distinctive and easier for me to understand. "Ame en'an'sal. Ame…ara'len sal. Su'juvagaran i've'an sul'sal'shenathe, la ga elgaren rya, in'julathast or'ena'sal ara'thanun."

As tears spilled from my eyes, I knew they were falling from Solas's as well, and I suddenly felt as though I were intruding on a profoundly private moment simply by sharing in his pain. I turned and left them, walking far enough away that I could no longer decipher whatever words they shared as the last pieces of her slipped away into death. Cole found me and huddled close, his head bowed. "He would say that you don't deserve the pain and he doesn't want to share it with you," Cole said in a low monotone, "but it would be a lie. For so long it felt like screaming into the Void - now at least he knows someone hears."

"Shouldn't you be with him?" I asked, glad of his insight but far more concerned for Solas than I was for myself.

"He doesn't want me," Cole told me miserably, "not now. Feeling the pain makes it real, makes her real, and he needs to know that she was , that she existed, that they…lived lifetimes of love together, pursuing a private passion that few understand."

I quickly strangled the envy or jealousy - I didn't even take time to identify the emotion - that tried to grip me. This was not the time. "Everything about them seemed to fit, somehow," I told the spirit beside me.

"A mirror of reflected possibilities," he murmured, "he for her, and she for him." He gave himself a little shake. "But - but not like that - not the way that eats at you, no matter how you try not to let it. You would have seen what they were and weren't in time, if," his voice sank again, "if there had been time."

"I believe you," I told him, and I did, even though I knew that belief wouldn't erase my doubts.

We were silent for a moment, and I listened to the indistinct music of the Elvish words being spoken behind me - beautiful in their cadence and soft syllables, even when the grief underlying them was palpable.

"She wants to see you one last time," Cole said abruptly, straightening and taking my elbow. "She wants to see that you are really here, in the world, and that he won't be alone."

I went with Cole willingly and knelt in the tangled grass before Wisdom. There were gaps visible in her now as she lost cohesion and returned to the fertile energy of the Fade. The damp of early spring soaked almost immediately through my hose, and made me think, for some reason, of all the memories Wisdom and I might have shared, that we now never would. This time when tears pricked my eyes, it was for my own lost opportunities. Wisdom and I both loved Solas, and he loved both of us. Chances were good I would have grown to love her, too, and now I was robbed of that chance.

"Ina'lan'ehn," she whispered, looking at me. "Solas, sul'ana ash on'el o sul'anas mar'lin."

" Juesayan ," he choked out with a flood of contradictory emotions that he was much too overwhelmed to rein in and keep from me.

"Ma melava halani, y mala nadas rosas'sule'din. Sathan, halani dinan," she said softly.

There was a moment of silence as he struggled, but at last he mastered himself. "Ma nuvenin."

He reached out, using his magic to untangle the knotted energies that made her who and what she was, and then aided the freed energy in making its way back across the Veil. "Dar'eth shiral, ma falon."

I looked up at him, searching for something to say, and came up with nothing.

"Now I must endure," he whispered anyway, one of his hands smoothing away hair stuck to my face with sweat and tears. His gaze was anguished, and yet it held a degree of warmth as he studied me. "This was not your failure, ma vhenan," he told me. "You did everything I asked of you and more."

He rose to his feet and offered his hand, pulling me up beside him, but his voice, when he spoke again, was devoid of sympathy: "We know where the blame lies. Now, all that remains is what to do with them," and he gestured toward the mages.

Tel'abelas. Ame en'an'sal. Ame…ara'len sal. Su'juvagaran i've'an sul'sal'shenathe, la ga elgaren rya, in'julathast or'ena'sal ara'thanun: I'm not sorry. I am blessed. I am...myself again. I will return to the Beyond for rebirth, as all spirits must, clothed in the triumphant joy of my purpose.

Ina'lan'ehn: Beautiful

Solas, sul'ana ash on'el o sul'anas mar'lin: Solas, serve (imperative form) her better than you serve yourself.

Juesayan: I will try

Ma melava halani, y mala nadas rosas'sule'din: You helped me, but now you must endure

Sathan, halani dinan: Lit. "Please, help me die," but "Guide me into death" might better capture the intent.

Ma nuvenin: As you wish

Dar'eth shiral, ma falon: Safety on your journey, my friend