A nose snuffled in Finley's hair, and she grumbled, fighting against the urge to wake up just yet.

While she'd never been fond of dreams, she was tired.

She had always been driven—first to survive and then with her research into the Blight—but after the Blight, she'd always been able to make her own schedule. When she reached her limit, she'd been able to step back and rest.

The word almost had no meaning to her now.

Solas' friend had been bound and turned into a demon.

While they had managed to save it, it had still…

Finley wasn't sure if 'died' was the right word, but it was gone, and so was Solas.

She had never been close to spirits, but she knew the kind of loss it was to watch someone dear die. To know one did everything they could to try to save someone and had still come up short.

She didn't fault him at all for leaving.

This mad quest to save the world was taking everything from everyone.

If it wasn't outright killing them.

That same nose nudged her head, followed by a soft mix between a whinny and a whine.

Groaning, she felt the Fade slipping further away and resigned herself to be part of the waking world.

After splitting ways with Solas, she had needed her own time to herself, to properly mourn all that had been lost, all that was bound to be lost. She'd needed time to think.

And there was so much to think about.

How her life might have been different if she could have taught that spirit right from wrong—not that it should have been her responsibility, but she couldn't help but wonder.

She was hearing more whispers now. Solas had mentioned that her demon—spirit, whatever it was—had claimed her in a way. Now that it was gone, there was nothing to stop the curious creature from whispering to Finley, offering a tip or promise as she cast.

Even as quick as she cast her spells, she could already tell the difference. They were still easy to ignore, easier really, as her demon had been considerably more adamant about keeping in touch.

More than that, though, she could feel herself being watched by unfamiliar eyes.

Yet whenever she dreamed in the Fade, she would come back to that same spot with the cascading books, and nothing more than wisps would dare come near. And even they seemed afraid.

Of her.

The irony of it was a bit...

Finley half wished to send a bird message after Solas, to ask him more about spirits and demons and the Fade, but she couldn't bring herself to. She didn't want to pick at a wound so fresh.

If demons could be redeemed, if that had really been what happened, what of others? Solas had said the ones coming through the rifts were mad, but what about the one that had taken Mathel?

During the Blight, her first love had given himself over to a pride demon to buy Finley and a few others time to flee. She'd felt so betrayed that he would turn to demons. But what if...what if it hadn't been a demon? What if it hadn't been pride?

It had twisted his flesh into that of an abomination's—she could still see that last smile he'd given her before turning away and becoming...that—but what if...what if they'd stayed and fought with him? Would the demon have left, like her demon could? Could he have been saved?

Could Aubrey have been saved? What of her other friends that the demon had taken over?

And why had Flemeth sent her to the Conclave? Had she known something was going to happen?

If not for Flemeth, Finley wouldn't be in the situation she was in now. She wouldn't have the mark, wouldn't have been involved with any of this.

She wouldn't have been sending people off to die.

But if she hadn't been there, would there have been anyone to intercept Corypheus' ritual? Would there have been any survivors at the Conclave? And how quickly would he have risen to power?

She wanted to be sure, to know where she stood so that she could move forward without fear.

She was tired of feeding creatures like the Nightmare. Even if it couldn't find her itself, she knew she was a beacon for fear demons. The whispers now almost always played on fears.

She'd had her fears in the Wilds, but they hadn't ruled over her like they did now.

But then, there hadn't been templars at every turn or eyes always watching her, or decisions that affected anyone else.

She couldn't go back to the freedoms of her Wilds, but she couldn't keep going like this, bogged down with terror constantly.

And so she'd taken her time going back to Skyhold, trying to figure out how she could change. If a demon could do it, surely she could, too? Weren't people renowned for being more malleable than spirits?

On the road, she'd fallen into a strange mixture of old and new habits. She'd traveled alone, set her own pace, but still found herself helping the people she came across, rather than hiding from or avoiding them.

She'd gotten caught up healing some poor people in the Exalted Plains, including helping with a Dalish clan, though they would need much more assistance in the future. All of them would.

People always did.

Donovan had warned her about that. So had Flemeth. Let people depend on you once and it never stopped.

She should have made trades. People were less likely to take advantage when they knew they had to give something up to get what they wanted.

But the people she'd met had been so destitute, so broken, with so little left.

She hadn't been able to say no to them, or demand payment of any kind.

And she'd begun to wonder if maybe Flemeth and Donovan's advice wasn't...flawed. Or rather, that while it worked for the Wilds, maybe she needed to be more open to new ways. To new advice. New people.

Like the ones she helped. They'd been wary of her at first, yes, but then, as they'd accepted her as a healer, they'd told her of the people prowling the plains, of the devastation and the civil war that had them second guessing everyone who happened by their homes.

In the end, she'd done so little, knowing that she needed to get back to Skyhold, back to fixing the world in the ways only she could.

It was exhausting.

She'd returned to Skyhold, thinking of all the people who still needed help and all the places she still needed to go back to, only to forget it all as a familiar tug of magic caught her attention. She'd followed it, all the way down into the dungeons, only to find Donovan locked up with both tevinter magisters she'd captured in the Western Approach. Erimond had started frothing at the mouth, ready to argue and tell her how damned she was.

She'd ignored him and picked the lock on Donovan's cage. As soon as she dispersed the magic bindings on him, and the old elf had used a silencing spell on Erimond, which had left Magister Servis most showering the both of them with grattitude. He didn't even seem to care that they'd left him in the dungeons for the time being.

Time that was stretching out longer than he'd likely expected. At least Erimond would be silent.

Unless some idiot dispelled the curse, which was completely possible with so many templars about—and Circle mages who were ever curious about spells that didn't involve them.

Donovan, however, had hugged her once he was free.

It had been the most out of character thing he'd ever done that she'd half wondered if he wasn't possessed.

Then he'd whacked her on the head with his staff—he always stored a few miniaturized ones on his person, enough that templars couldn't find them all—and told her she was a damned idiot, and that he thought the templars had killed her.

Again.

She'd told him of falling into the Fade again, and he'd muttered about doing something to bind her to this world. She'd thought she heard a waver in his voice, but it was gone quick enough as he told her how lucky Skyhold was that she was alive. He'd been picking at his bindings and had planned to raze the whole damned place when Magister Servis had told him that 'Finley' lived.

He'd only half believed him, thinking the mage might be trying to get out of his own miserable demise.

If she'd taken much longer, though, he was quite insistent that he would have blown the place to pieces in vengeance.

It had been so good to see him again, even if he had groused about how weird her hair looked short and how she had to stop playing in the Fade and getting her spells severed.

On the way to ward the war room, Finley had caught a messenger and told them to inform Leliana of her return.

She hadn't expected all of the advisors to come to the war room quite so quickly…

She'd rather hoped Donovan would have time to leave without having to deal with 'that damned blonde haired bastard' again.

As Finley felt herself slipping back toward sleep, despite her earlier acceptance to get up, the events that had happened in the war room came flooding back into place.

Her eyes snapped open, and she started to her feet, only to fall back when her hair tangled in something. She reached up, automatically assuming branches in her half-awake haze.

However, when she felt sharp, curving teeth nibbling on her hair instead, she hesitated.

Settling back to where she was, she ran her hand up, over the soft nostrils above those fangs, up into fur that stuck to her hand and held it in place.

She turned her head to look at the creature beside her, and it's goat-like eyes peered back at her, unblinking. Seaweed hung loosely amidst its mane, fresh water dripping from its body.

Arching her brow, she motioned with her free hand. "If you're going to eat me, you'd best be quick about it. I've a busy day."

Instantly, the fur around her hand smoothed out, and the kelpie leaned forward to nuzzle her face gleefully, its fur only slightly sticking to her skin before it pulled away.

Standing up, a quick spell banished the small aches in her muscles from sleeping on tree roots, and Finley stretched her arms over her head before reaching out and scritching behind the kelpie's ear.

It leaned into her touch, letting out a pleased huff before lifting and shaking its head.

She smiled up at it, idly wondering if anyone had seen her take to the water when she left. The last thing the Wilds needed was fools trying to hunt down a kelpie.

Their battered armor would rust and poison the ground wherever the kelpie left it.

She reached up to pet the beast's face again, offering it a soft smile. "You should know, they've got me balancing on horses these days." The kelpie straightened up, as though indignant and let out a low hiss through its teeth. "That's how I feel." When the beast didn't seem content, she leaned toward it again, hugging it around the neck. "You are far, far better than any horse could ever be."

It let out a gleeful sound, something akin to a whinny, though there was a deeper tone to it.

"It's true," Finley insisted, settling back down and dusting off her pants. "Other obvious reasons of your superior nature aside, it's ridiculously hard to stay on top of them, not like you." She scratched under the creature's chin, and it gave her a toothy smile, mouth stretching back further than a horse's could, revealing dozens of sharp, curved teeth.

Kelpies were somewhat like those light trees that she'd found as a girl. There was a magic in them, old and powerful. They were brilliant creatures—she often suspected they were smarter than humans.

Granted, she thought most animals were smarter than humans. And if not smarter, they were still better.

Kelpies though, they were a breed of their own, and one of the best kept secrets of the Wilds. She'd told Mathel of them, long ago, but he hadn't believed her, and the kelpies had liked to play games with her, always hiding before he came by so that she looked like she was making up tall tales.

Well, that implied she was friends with more than one of them.

Really, it was just this kelpie.

When she was a girl, barely a few months in the Wilds, she'd stumbled across a colt ensnared in a hunter's trap. It's leg was mangled, and it had been trying desperately to drag itself to the water, based on the blood trail on the ground.

Finley hadn't known much about anything at the time, but she'd seen horses before—the Chantry she'd stayed at had one, but she wasn't allowed to play with him—and she thought she knew what she was looking at.

That, and the creature's pitiful wails had broken her heart and reminded her of the songbirds her father had hurt.

It had taken her an hour to get the colt to let her near enough to see its injuries. It had taken her another hour to figure out how to get the trap off its leg and another to mend it enough that it could use its leg again.

Dusk had been falling when she finally healed the little beast's leg. It had wobbled around a few steps, she had healed it again sapping most of her energy in the process, and then it had taken several running steps before heading back to her.

Or she'd thought it was heading back to her.

That was, until she felt something's breath against her shoulder and had turned to find a grown version of the colt standing behind her, head low and teeth bared.

That was when it really sunk in that she wasn't dealing with horses.

Even as her mind blanked in fear, the colt had clopped to an awkward stop beside her and growled at the larger kelpie. Then it had nibbled on Finley's hair, nuzzled her, and snapped at the larger Kelpie as though to threaten it away.

With a huff, the adult had turned back to the lake and trotted into it, pausing to look over its shoulder at the colt, who had stopped to lick Finley on the cheek before prancing into the water after the other.

She'd had a few close encounters with the beasts after, always narrowly making it up into a tree where they couldn't get her, but one day, when she'd turned to find herself face to face with one, very much like that first time—kelpies were eerily stealthy when they wanted to be—the creature had surprised her further by licking her square across the face. As it had nuzzled her and pranced a little in place, she'd seen the old scar on its leg and known exactly who it was.

Ever since, on the chance that she encountered another kelpie, it would merely eye her and leave her be. Of course she always returned the favor. The others only dared come closer to her if her kelpie was there. They never came close enough to touch, but they would appraise her with tilted heads before getting bored and disappearing into the waters, leaving their companion to play with its human.

Sometimes she wondered if they considered her the one's pet.

Whatever the reason, she was glad to have her friend, and had been surprised to find it waiting for her in the waters near Skyhold. She'd gone to the waters, hoping run across the river where no one could intercept her easily, but as she'd reached the edge of the river, it had emerged, eager to meet her with a slurped lick across the face.

It made her wonder if the creature hadn't been looking for her, having noticed her absence in the Wilds.

"You are brilliant," she murmured, resting her head against the kelpie's shoulder before sighing. "But I have to go now." The second she'd said that, its fur stuck to her, making it impossible to pull away. "I've thought for so long that you were my oldest friend, but...one of my templars is alive." When the kelpie snorted, and lowered its head with a growl, she patted it, only for her hand to stick too. "No, not a bad one. I told you about them, a long time ago, if you remember. He's the one who drew the pictures for my stories."

The kelpie seemed to think on it a moment before Finley found herself able to move away from it. Trotting forward a step, it sniffed at the bag on Finley's hip. She opened it enough to pull out her old story book and held it up. With a snort, the kelpie tilted its head and looked at her, taking a step back.

"He's sick, you see." She ran her fingers over the cover of her book and then tucked it away again. "He's sick and he's been sick and I...I thought he was dead."

She knew this river from some of her furthest adventures away from the Chantry as a girl, when Ser Caudry had taken her out to look for songbirds. It was almost a full day on foot from here to the fields that surrounded her beloved home.

Odd that she would think of it as that after so long.

After all, it hadn't been her home in years.

Still, its warmth found its way into her dreams sometimes, and she'd never been able to resent the memories. They were of a good time, a good place, one that she simply hadn't been meant for.

Finley had told her kelpie the night before that she would have to branch away from the water, but it had hassled her, nibbling on and tugging her clothes until she finally agreed to settle down for the night beside the river.

Once she'd settled in at the base of a tree near the water, her kelpie had laid down beside her, pausing to snuffle her marked hand and make her well aware of its distaste for the mark.

Something they shared.

With a smile, she patted its mane, fingers trailing over the seaweed and hair.

"I don't know what kind of reception I'll get when I get there, or if he's still…" she tried not to think of what a few months might have taken from her. "But I owe him so much, and if I can help him, I have to." She hesitated and then patted the kelpie one last time. "I promise to come see you again when I can, though. And when this is over, I'll be back."

The kelpie let out a snort as though indignant that she thought it didn't know that already. Then, before she could try to say anything else, it leaned forward, licked her face with its rough tongue, turned away, and trotted into the water.

With a small smile, she wiped its slobber away and headed into the woods. She resisted the urge to say goodbye. She would be back again, to her Wilds.

Someday.

Surely.

...-...

A/N: Dorian jokingly compares the inquisitor to a unicorn in the game, so unicorns are canon legends on Thedas. if they can have unicorns, then they can have kelpies, too, lol. Thank you so much for reading!