Long was his silence, 'fore it was broken.
"For you, song-weaver, once more I will try.
To My children venture, carrying wisdom,
If they but listen, I shall return."

Andraste 1:14

It was all dark and quiet, then, but for Solas' breath, which came in shallow whimpers; he'd slipped back to the floor, and leaned his head back on the pillar, with his eyes still closed…

Tiredly, Dorian sat down in turn.

'How do I help you now, old friend…' the human whispered; Solas struggled to open his eyes, and remained silent for a further few seconds, then, finally too exhausted to fight, he directed his glance to Dorian's flask.

The Magister stood, only to kneel by the other's side, and offered the drink – the elf took a sip, rinsed his mouth of blood, then spat to the side. After, however, he drank two honest mouthfuls, and sighed.

'Veldrin cannot learn the full extent of this,' Solas said, in a barely there voice. 'That is how you can help.'

Dorian nodded, and stepped back in his corner. 'Of course not,' he sighed, in turn. 'I said I did not sleep with her, not that I do not love her.'

'Thank you,' the elf whispered, once more closing his eyes.

'Gods, Solas,' Dorian said, shaking his head. 'How often…'

'Three or four times a day,' Solas responded. 'Depends on the frequency and intensity of Magister Cassius' own visits; they try to complement each other as best they can.'

The Magister bitterly shook his head.

'Is there no way in which I could convince you to cast your famous pride aside, and simply beg Anaris to end it?'

'Is that what you would do?' Solas asked, with a shadow of a smile.

'I don't know,' Dorian replied, nervously running his fingers through his hair. 'If I thought I had the most minor chance of escape…'

'And do you reason that I might?' the elf quietly said; he chuckled dryly. 'I've imprisoned Anaris and Daren'thal for the best part of ten millennia, Dorian, and assisted the Evanuris in so thoroughly erasing them from the minds of the people that they had nowhere to turn but you and yours; I have destroyed my entire nation while struggling to save it. How many days of torment and pints of blood would you count as sufficient to repay that debt?'

'They will not let you go, Solas – they will not even let you starve yourself…'

'I know that,' the elf nodded. 'And it is not why I am refusing nourishment...Even if they would, indeed, allow me that narrow chance, it would take decades for it to function…I once slept for centuries. No,' he softly followed. 'The reason I do not eat is not because I hope that I might escape that way; I am simply trying to preserve what little dignity I still have left, amid all this – and why they allow that is because they know that robbing me of it will be far less humiliating than watching me having to renounce it.'

'Which I eventually will,' Solas said, a faint tremor in his voice. 'Other concerns will outgrow it… Anaris and Daren'thal have my leash well in hand, and not by chains and walls.'

'Arlathan is still safe,' Dorian kindly spoke. 'They've not surrendered it.'

The elf smiled sadly. 'I had both hoped and feared that Arlathan still stands…Despite the news of the outside that I am cruelly fed… This very hope is the leash's biting collar - that as long as I am alive to make sport on, Anaris and Daren'thal will spare Arlathan the worst of your kind's wrath, at least until their own wrath has dulled. They might then even come to understand that the people themselves were never guilty of the crime they used your kin to take such plentiful revenge for. Perhaps, if I last long enough, they might forgive, and allow a chance... Perhaps they will kill them all regardless,' Solas ended, in an exhausted whisper.

'And Cassius himself is not remotely worthy of this knowledge,' Dorian awkwardly reasoned; Solas chuckled, then briefly coughed.

'If the jester knew he was the jester, would he be half as funny? Or as dangerous?' the elf said, in a cracking voice. 'Cassius' unbound fervour in what he thinks will please his masters serves the same goal as the fool's threat in a queen's gambit serves in chess. Each day that with increasing creativity he asks for Arlathan, the bars of my true cage – not pain of the body, but guilt, and sorrow - grow thicker. He lets me know that you do not yet have it, but that the day is coming…By using him who does not know he's being used, Anaris taunts. It is only me that can fail, here, whether by death or breaking to the torment, or even faltering in the frail trust I still desperately hold in Veldrin. He takes pleasure in my knowing it.'

'And yes,' Solas said, with a smile that only depicted heartbreak, 'myself and Anaris were friends once. As you can probably guess, he was a better friend to me than I to him.'

'I'd not have guessed,' the human replied, shaking his head. 'Although, looking at it with the wisdom of hindsight, you do seem to have a rather predictable pattern of stabbing your friends in the back, so…'

'Then, as now, it could not have been helped,' Solas responded, with remarkably little spite. 'I've previously warned you not to romanticise Elvhenan; it was not a society of radiant, dainty elves frolicking merrily in dewy meadows. Its closest paragon in human history, for as bitterly ironic as it might seem, remains the Ancient Imperium.'

'Well,' Dorian shrugged, 'yes. Given whose influence its founders were under…'

'Indeed,' Solas nodded. 'The entities you referred to as the Old Gods recreated their vision of Elvhenan, using your kind – the only actual redeeming grace of the Imperium is the fact that humans die, and, for better or worse, their grudges and struggles die with them. Perhaps not in one generation, but in ten, still, history moves on, or finds a way to defuse its tensions without the consequences becoming truly catastrophic...We didn't die,' he dryly said. 'Each enmity, even if no more than a grain of sand, an ill-placed word, had time to grow and fester. We did not age, we did not forget, and we most certainly did not forgive.'

He drew a deep, pained breath. 'At the time when I, as you so kindly put it, first stabbed my friends in the back, a philosophical difference of opinion had, over millennia, grown into a chasm wide enough to swallow the entire world. The armies fielding themselves on the edges of this chasm did not see what lied before their feet – they only saw their enemies in the distance. Some of us thought ourselves ascended; the others, Anaris among them, thought themselves transcendent, and while you might think the semantics are irrelevant…'

'I actually don't,' Dorian sighed. 'I might not appreciate all the logical doodles and flourishes of Elvhen language, but I grasp this one well enough. Ascendance is available to all, transcendence is not. I still cannot understand why Anaris and crowd thought themselves that special; there was a whole raft of you godly…entities that it should have been clear you might be rare, but not unique.'

Solas let out a small chuckle. 'And that was precisely the argument that Athelas, the one you eventually called Dumat, employed. His base idea was that if the peasantry at large knew that we too, had learned our crafts, and not been born with them, they might have started trying to learn them as well.'

'Pfft,' the human scoffed. 'Throughout the ages, that remains a constant. Nothing more fearsome to the nobleman than the ploughman with a book.'

'Uhm, so-and-so,' Solas answered; he paused a moment, seeking his words. 'You remember Vivienne's fierce and cruel defence of the Mage Circles; as horrible as it sounded to your ears and mine, the base point remains that if a drunken man loses a hand of cards and starts a brawl, he might take out a tooth, or kill the one man that gets in the way of his fists.'

'…while if a drunken mage loses a hand of cards, they'll take out an entire village,' Dorian muttered.

'Exactly,' the elf said. 'And now take the harmful power of the average mage, and scale it to the level of one of us. We'd wipe out countries. We were, indeed, the first of our kind to reach such strength; because none had done it before, our steps were tentative and slow, and so as we learned our crafts, we also learned restraint. Athelas'…I mean, Dumat's, argument was that we can trust ourselves with our powers, but we can trust no-one else. The path we'd used was now, to his mind, well-trod, and those who'd follow would go along it too fast to learn restraint.'

'That is…' Dorian laughed, 'so unbearably transparent, I…Thus, his solution was – it's in the interest of the proletariat to freeze at night, because if they observe us making fire, they'll try to replicate it, and, in the process they might burn their hut down?'

'A decent summary,' Solas agreed. 'His stance presented other side benefits, of course; not all of our society could dream their days away in libraries in the Fade. Someone still needed to brew their tea and take out their seldom filled chamber pots, attend to them while they slept…To myself and Dirthamen1 this was arbitrary insanity; we did not understand how a man who read a book in the light of dawn could suddenly be proclaimed better than a man not allowed to read that same book at dusk.'

'Not surprisingly, perhaps, Dumat's ideas caught traction with a very specific segment of society: those who had built walls around their wealth to guard it. Now, they were promised walls could be erected around knowledge, too, and so, both privileges would be kept well out of the grasp of those whom nature itself had intended for service only. Within a temple, for some. Within a bloodline, for others.' He said, looking to Dorian in open irony.

'Well, Solas,' the human stingingly shot back, 'it does not sound like we stole much from you. It's increasingly obvious that Elvhenan got drunk, and Tevinter inherited the hangover.'

'Did I touch on something sensitive, Magister Pavus?' the elf ironically asked, a brief flicker of his infuriating, old self in his eyes.

'The fact that I drew the winning ticket out of a fucked-up urn is less an indictment on me than on the person who designed the urn.' Dorian snarled.

'I did not design the urn.' Solas said, dryly. 'Nor, bar terrible misjudgements, would it have come to be constructed; we were split on the subject, not mortal enemies…above all, we were not rulers of others, not yet, at least – we were simply men and women whose personal power had grown to the point where it influenced the realm. It was not unreasonable that we should speak on how we'd influence it, but this was not a political gathering of any sort. We had, however agreed to end the conversation by majority decision, and none was reached…'

'Sat that one out, did you?' the human smirked.

'Excuse me?' Solas asked, this time in genuine confusion.

'Well,' Dorian mumbled, 'unless my counting is as flawed as that of your previous visitor, you were fifteen – seven on each side, with you in the non-committal middle.'

'Ah,' the elf chuckled. 'No, we were not fifteen.'

'By Vel's accounts,' the human said, shaking his head, 'there would be seven Forgotten Ones and seven Creators, both groups excluding you…And now that I think about it, you should have been sixteen – who is that God of the Dead…'

Solas rolled his eyes. 'The Dalish got it horribly wrong, once more,' he sighed. 'Falun'Din, for it is he that you are speaking of, was the only one of the so-called Gods worthy of the title, and the only true immortal.'

'You're confusing me beyond hope,' Dorian muttered.

'Falun'Din is one of the Undying,' Solas bitterly chuckled.

'One of Imshael's lot?' the human queried, in utter surprise. 'I thought…'

'That all of them are evil?' Solas shot back. 'No, they are not…of all the things to mourn' he added, in a whisper, 'the knowledge lost…No, the Undying are not universally evil, and, just like all other spirits, some wish to toy with the unchanging world, and others do not. Falun'Din never embodied, though he could have; the closest he could be described as, in your understanding, is a spirit of compassion far more secure in himself and wiser than Cole, who took upon himself the task of minimising the danger that those who died in great anger or sorrow could cause, in the Fade; a shepherd of souls, if you wish, but one who did not meddle with the living.'

Dorian thoughtfully nodded. 'I thought your people never died, though.'

'If left untouched, no, we did not,' Solas shrugged. 'But the people were not immune to disease. Women still died in childbirth, men still died in wars, or hunting; the young still fell off trees – people still died in uthenara, if they tried to undertake it while not fully prepared for it…Not all who took a knife to the chest could rise again. Death not unknown; we simply had no notion of aging.'

'This still does not explain…'

'Your original arithmetic conundrum?' the elf said, with a pained half smile. 'The solution is simpler than you think – we were fourteen, and not fifteen, at the time, and you should know me better by now than to assume that with such a thing at stake, I would abstain.'

'True,' Dorian sighed.

'So yes,' the elf followed, 'it was not that I withdrew, but that, at the time, we were one less, so it came to an even split. It left some bitterness in its wake, but all seemed to accept the outcome, and we parted with no action…For all of our great so called wisdom, however, we'd failed to account for one crucial detail: influencing the realm was no longer a simple matter of our choice.'

'Whether we wanted to or not, we could not help touching other's lives; say a beast beyond the strength of any normal hunter terrorises a village. If Andruil2 could deliver them from it, and they plead for her to do so, would it be moral for her to stand aside?' he softly asked.

Dorian thoughtfully nodded.

'And so,' Solas continued, returning to his tale in an exhausted voice, 'the mere fact that we had had that conversation touched the fabric of the Empire. The kings and nobles who would have followed your Dumat were displeased by our lack of decision, and so, began to press – Athelas and Anaris, still bitter, silently encouraged them; Andoral3 went a step further, and demanded they wear their allegiance on their sleeve, as it were, and hers is the first known vallaslin4. This caught stock with the others, faster than you would think – soon, the numbers of those who would have seen the arbitrary line of division drawn became visible…'

'An avalanche,' Dorian bitterly reckoned.

'Quite,' Solas whispered. 'Within the group you now know as the Evanuris, there were varying reactions. Elghar'nan5 was amused, and basically shrugged it off; we were no one to prevent people from mutilating themselves was his stance – he was the one most endowed with destructive magic, and saw no threat that could match it. June6, on the other hand, was more than rattled; quiet and unassuming, least war-like of us all, a great friend to the Children of the Stone and happy to tinker for decades on whatever mechanism she'd dreamt of in the Fade, she felt vulnerable, and perhaps, she was…She did not go as far as to create her own markings, but she began pressing that the wave of the…conversions, shall we say, be stopped.'

'The others were building themselves an army, she surmised,' the elf continued, shaking his head in sorrow, 'and if we were not careful…Mythal, of all, agreed, but war was not her wish. She simply thought that a show of our numbers would create some sort of deterrent. I,' Solas tiredly said, 'bitterly opposed this, but the rest did not, and so more vallaslin were made, and more were marked, and lightning began gathering in earnest…May I…' he whispered, casting a dull glance at Dorian.

Without thought, Dorian nodded, and stood to offer him another drink of the flask.

'You know,' the human said, with wooden humour, 'for one who was not partial to my brandy earlier in the day, you are becoming quite fond of it.'

He took a droplet of the liquid from the elf's chapped lips with his thumb.

'It is tolerable brandy,' Solas said, with a minute, tortured half-shrug. 'It could additionally be said that earlier in the day I did not have three broken ribs and a stab wound. Also, I do now owe you, which I find more difficult to stomach than the stab wound…'

'…but not the broken ribs?' Dorian quipped.

'Your sense of humour is abhorrent,' Solas frowned; still, there was a glint of genuine amusement in the depth of his eyes. 'I suspect that is why you feel compelled to carry brandy.'

'Indeed,' the human answered, finding it in himself to crack a smile as he sat back down. 'My entire social life and political presence are predicated upon carrying it. Though, admittedly,' he followed, 'it is more designed to make other people tolerable to me, than the other way round. Is it…' he tentatively began, 'safe for you to speak of all of this?'

The elf hesitated for split second, then slowly nodded. 'What more can happen to me now? It is but history,' he said. 'I am not seeking to endear myself to you by recounting, however, thus if you wish…'

'No,' Dorian responded. 'It factually helps; as you may have already guessed, a world of living Gods was not what we had bargained for, and we are not even remotely ready for it. Nor,' he continued, 'do I think that Lusacan and Razikale would speak of what you are speaking now.'

'Gods need their mystery,' Solas ironically said.

'Especially those Gods who started wars we are still fighting, despite having no bloody clue why,' the Magister muttered.

'They didn't start it,' the elf curtly refuted; his words made Dorian frown in confusion.

'I'd thought…' he began. Solas shook his head.

'They might have been the spiritual parents of the conflict,' he said dryly, 'but I cannot lie, and shan't. They did not start the war. Andruil did.'

'How on earth,' the human breathed out.

'By making Ghilan'nain,' Solas replied, with a small grin. 'Ghilan'nain, Mother of the Halla, the fifteenth one of us and the youngest amid the first people.'

'Kaffas,' Dorian said, in sudden understanding – Solas smirked horribly at the word, but the human paid him no heed. 'I know from Vel that Andruil did create her, but I had not suspected…'

'Well, Dalish myth is once more Dalish myth, and my sweet vhenan is proudly Dalish,' the elf sadly chuckled. 'How compelling would the legend of Ghilan'nain be, if it stated not that Andruil made her because she was a righteous and kind person, who died defending woodland creatures from reckless, cruel hunters, but that she made her for simple political gain?'

The human shook his head, not knowing whether he felt amusement or dismay. 'Well,' he said, 'that must have gone downhill fast. I mean, I see how Dumat and Lusacan did not take well to being outvoted by a holy goat…'

'Oh, they were quite literally breathing fire,' Solas confirmed. 'Andruil's gambit did not pay; far from accepting majority decision achieved by trickery, the ones the people forgot became enraged. This was precisely the thoughtless, rapid elevation that they had spoken up against; not only that, but Andruil had taken her involvement with the realm to an entirely different level, as she had brought back one that should have been dead. Of all powers that us elevated mortals possessed, this one – the power over not life alone but death itself, had not been exercised; none of us had gone there, before. By Andruil's actions, this had now truly become…'

'The realm of the living Gods,' Dorian expressionlessly said.

'And there was no way to abscond from it,' the elf said, slowly. 'Not anymore.'

He paused for a second, and closed his eyes. 'And now,' he said, on shaky breath, 'you see it, do you not…Dorian…With the markings of their chosen side upon their faces the people stood divided. The frenzy of the vallaslin continued; now, nobles did not only mark their own faces, but those of their servants and soldiers. If one wished to do laundry in a particular household, one had to mar their face with the sign of whomever the master of the house chose to follow. The powerless who followed none, but had neither knowledge nor wealth could scarcely refuse – an abstract moral standing does not keep one fed, so even those who had no stake in the conflict took the vallaslin…'

'And then,' Dorian whispered, 'let me guess – with one's face marked, one could scarcely switch employers, and one's current employer quickly saw the advantages in that.'

'Thus, with nowhere to go, the powerless became indentured. Then, slaves.' Solas nodded. 'Then, less than nothing, to one side and the other. I was horrified.' He softly spoke. 'All of the first people gleefully used the latter born, and took pleasure in counting how many had taken their vallaslin; Mythal still thought it an useful balance, I…could not see it so.'

'Shem'len,' he whispered, 'forget their Gods, in time. The danger of this all was not merely war; wars are fought, won and lost, and sometimes necessary. The true danger lied in the fact that some of the latter born had begun to earnestly see us as Gods – faith in one man, no matter how powerful or wise is but a flickering candle to the roaring fire of religion. Men can be questioned, Gods can not, and so, in the Gods' names, people do what they would never, in their darkest dreams they might have thought of doing under a man's orders. It all needed to be stopped.'

'I did not turn on Anaris because he'd indeed been my friend and his trust in me made him an easier target,' Solas said. 'I turned on him because the elites who stood by his side his side were fewer in their numbers. There was,' he continued in a trembling voice, 'no other way to stop the fire from spreading – even with them defeated, their true followers would not forget them, so it was clear that…'

'Oh, Maker,' Dorian whispered. 'And all of you agreed to this monstrosity?'

The elf helplessly shrugged. 'Not per se,' he shakily responded, 'but there was a tacit understanding that they could not simply be defeated. They would need to be utterly expunged from the hearts and minds and even memories of the people – you've seen how easily they were brought back with the veil merely weakened...You know, in fact, that even in the presence of the full veil, they could still be reached by the Magisters Sidereal; for fear of such a future event, we could not allow their faiths to survive them. It was then that I created the spell that I might have used on Veldrin to remove the vallaslin, but where the allegiance was more than skin deep…'

'The aftermath was bloody, but it was less bloody than it might have been if I had truly allowed it to progress to the point where half of the Empire would take arms against the other half,' Solas said, in a defeated whisper. 'We'd thought the ones who'd sought to pass for Gods were imprisoned, their true followers slain, their names erased; further millennia passed, in relative peace, but the danger was already loose among us, and staring us, quite literally, in the face.'

'I can't imagine what you must have felt when you saw Veldrin's vallaslin,' Dorian softly uttered.

'You're right,' Solas curtly replied. 'You can't. I was aghast when, after the defeat of the Forgotten Ones, the practice of blood writing continued, as did the insidious notion that we were Gods. The very thing we'd killed so many to oppose was still there, its roots too strong by now…'

'As our strength grew, so did our arrogance,' he said. 'I bitterly called this Andoral's revenge – she might have been long gone, but the poisoned gift she'd left behind only now showed its power. With the people wearing their allegiances on their skin, for all to see, it was only a matter of time before the Evanuris began counting their followers too, as if the people had been sheep. I wished for no part in this game, but I was not spared it.'

'An unmarked face spoke as loudly as any vallaslin,' Dorian nodded.

'For what was worse, mine was the only known method to remove the blood-writings,' Solas continued, 'and I did so for all who asked, without reservation; the vallaslin was, by now, far from being a sign of sincere admiration. It served to mark the people as farmers marked cattle; it served to differentiate the rich from the poor, the learned from the illiterate…By the end of it all, it had even come to serve as some perverse form of travel papers – woe to the servant of Elghar'nan caught in Andruil's forests...Removing the vallaslin was truly restoring a person's freedom.'

The Magister laughed. 'And, I think you might have gotten away with it,' he said, 'if it had been a philosophical point. But it wasn't, was it? You and yours were not only offending the Gods. You began undermining the economy.'

'You would know,' Solas answered, with a thin smile.

'I would,' Dorian agreed, 'which is why I am depriving you of the pleasure of saying it. I know your views on slavery well enough, and I can guess where you are leading; even if you had massacred the previous ruling class, another one rose in its wake – with the same appetites, but with the added, born expectation that those appetites should be satisfied cheaply, or, if at all possible, for free.'

'As I said,' the elf snarled, 'you would know.'

'I won't descend to that debate, as it is endless,' Dorian answered, simply. 'It is, however, refreshing to see how similar we actually were.'

'Vile habits are far easier to adopt than good ones, I agree,' Solas coldly said. He angrily shook his head. 'That is when I became the Dread Wolf – the creature who would take the innocent, defenceless sheep from the protections of their masters and their Gods.' he added, with subdued fire. 'If one does not like an idea, what better way to see it die than cast those who speak of it as the villain, and terrorise those who might benefit from it to the marrows of their bones? Andruil, I believe, came up with the name first; she and I had not seen eye to eye for some time, and, of course, it stands to reason that the great huntress would describe me as a foe that she was still best placed to overpower.'

'The name caught well enough,' Dorian noted. 'That is all that the Dalish know you as.'

'It was a double edged blade, though,' Solas responded. 'Some did, indeed, live in fear of me, but that only made the loyalty of those who listened stronger. It was the least of my intentions, but I gained many to my side – reluctantly, I came to understand that posturing was sometimes necessary, and that, for some, only a God would present sufficient protection from other Gods. I did not fight the name because it served…Until, just like you noted, the others saw in the unmarked face as much of a declaration of allegiance as the vallaslin were.'

'Throughout the land, those who believed in me, or at the very least did not believe in them were hunted, forcefully marked or killed. I truly am not a God. I could not be everywhere to defend them, and while I was not initially aiming for an army, the rest of the Evanuris thought I was. I begged Mythal to reason with them – and she tried to; reason did not work, so she made one terrible mistake of her own. She reminded them of the Well of Sorrows.'

'The place that had undeniable memories of the strong once having been weak,' Solas whispered. 'The only living record of our truths, as inconvenient as they might have become and so, they murdered her. To keep her silent.'

Dorian bit his lower lip and nodded. 'And from then on…'

The elf shrugged. 'You know the rest,' he said. 'With her murder, the last of the barriers had been shattered, the last doubt dispelled; they'd shown their true colours. They were no better than the ones the people forgot, and no more worthy of being present in the living world than the others – I could see into their futures, all of their futures, and I saw nothing but the very war we'd sought to quell, not fought by two armies, but six…With Mythal gone, all hope that we could at least preserve a fragile truce and not turn on each other had vanished, thus…'

'I did not think I would completely sever the people from the Fade,' he said, vibrant pain in his voice. 'How could I have? It was no more imaginable to me than say, removing all the air in the world – I did not think the possibility existed, and now…'

He looked to Dorian, and tried to smile. 'I am the very first to admit death is too good; I selfishly wished for it, on Seheron, yet there is justice in what Anaris is meting out, here. I am a man who has measurably left the world a worse place than when he found it. How many,' he bitterly chuckled, 'can truly boast that? I've not only failed to save my people, but I have doomed us all to endless strife… Despite what you doubtlessly think, the prolonged ruin and torment of your people was never my goal.'

'I believe you,' Dorian kindly said.

'Thank you,' Solas responded, lowering his glance. 'It is…undeserved comfort.'

'Will the prison of the Evanuris hold?' Dorian queried; he drew a sharp breath when the elf helplessly shrugged.

'That is the true question, is it not? It is brave of you to ask what even Anaris fears to.' Solas said. 'I am sadly inclined to think it will not.'

'You must have had a plan,' the human pressed. 'I mean…'

'I did have a plan,' the elf responded, 'and ideally, I might have had much more time to see it through. I'd meant to reinforce their bindings before removing the veil, but without the foci that Veldrin destroyed in the year of the Inquisition, it was impossible even for me to cross physically into the Fade. I had intended to make another, and I know how to, but as you might intuit, the construction steps of such things as foci were not designed with any considerations for expediency in mind…'

'For what is worse,' he quietly added, 'all of the first people shared extraordinary Fade attunement, but the expressions they took were vastly different. Not all of us were even mages, in the current acceptation of the term; my own powers had not returned to me, and despite Mythal's sacrifice, I gained raw strength, but none of my old finesse.'

'That is why the orb Corypheus carried was so important to me – it had been mine, millennia before, and it stored the very refined expression of my own magic. Now I would have to write it all anew. It would not take as long as it had the first time around, but it would still take significant time…Decades, perhaps…I was in no rush to act, not before Arlathan itself was strong enough to survive the death throes of your world...Not while Veldrin still lived, to see the inevitable carnage.'

'Not while she still lived to oppose you,' Dorian coldly put in.

'That too,' the elf earnestly admitted. 'She is a remarkable woman, with remarkable powers; there is no wonder Daren'thal greets her as an equal. In another world…I'd nonetheless seen her defeat impossible odds in this one; I could not rest easy thinking that she could not find a way to counter me, and, as we see…'

He helplessly shrugged. 'The passage of time could only work in my favour. Her friends and yours of the former Inquisition believed her, but the true powers that could have hindered me did not, just as I had expected. Orlais and Ferelden even regarded the exodus of the people as a blessing in disguise.'

Dorian cranked his nose. 'O-of course,' he muttered. 'That is why you left Tevinter to last.'

'For as much as it pained me to do so, yes.' Solas answered. 'You were the only realm where the elves would truly be missed, and even if you would have been crippled, you would have retaliated. You, I could not touch until the very end…Dorian,' the elf began, narrowing his eyes, 'if I may ask, how is this knowledge of any use to you? It is rare that the victor affords their defeated enemy such luxury of time for explanation, and neither of us can change what has already come to pass.'

'Because we all committed terrible blunders,' the human said, looking away, 'and I would know how they came to pass. We are, none of us fools, and trust me, I feel less inclined to judge you for breaking the Elvhen from the Fade, now that I've managed to effectively restore the Old Gods.'

'You did not do it alone,' Solas said.

'Well, yes,' Dorian replied, in irritation, 'but excuse me if regardless of your hefty involvement in the matter, causing my first historical fuck-up leaves me mildly rattled. You've managed three so far, two in my lifetime, so I guess for you the novelty is probably wearing off. I'm a bit more thin-skinned, eh?'

'I am also the one of us who has to fight for a way out of the blunders we commonly caused,' the human added, 'as your current abode is not the pinnacle of style and comfort, and you are effectively out of play. What happens next is a purely intellectual exercise for you to ponder in the blessed space between two beatings. It's a tad more material to me. Not to mention Vel, if she does not immediately spring to mind.'

'I understand that all too well,' Solas returned, unpleasant intensity returned to his stare, 'but the roots of our grandiose symphony of errors, or at the very least this movement of it, will not aid you going forth. Please, take me at my word.' He said – and for as much as the Magister wished that the elf was lying, he bitterly knew that he was not; his stomach turned with dread.

'Please, Solas,' Dorian said, in a strangled voice.

The other held looked to him with an unreadable expression for what felt like a century before yielding. 'As you wish.' Solas said. 'But you have twice been warned that this leads nowhere…'

'Warning taken,' the human said. 'You said yourself you'd not planned to attack Tevinter for decades. Was the eluvian the cause…?'

'No,' Solas earnestly replied. 'There was little I feared could come through a doorway sized eluvian. I feared facing Veldrin, of course, because of the inevitable outcome – if she had come for me, I would have had to kill her, but…that was the only thing I feared. None of you were a match for me, even less so within the Crossroads. Or so I thought - Morrigan's presence changed that; after the Voices of the Well, she knew too much and I had failed to see the weakness that her son represented. She was a great danger to me, so I felt pressured into action.'

'Go on,' Dorian said, swallowing dry. 'How did you learn of Morrigan's presence? We failed in hiding the eluvian, but she was hidden to the very end. You did not venture half a patient decade on a guess.'

'I didn't guess. I knew.' Solas replied. 'I could not watch you as arduously in Minrathous as I might have done in Val Royaux,' he yielded, when his long stare and curtness were met with naught but the humans' insistent gaze, 'but I did watch you, encountering much the same problem with it as Magister Cassius did…'

'Eh?' Dorian perked.

'Your house servants like you,' the elf shrugged. 'You treat them exceptionally well, hence there was no bribe enticing enough, nor grudge I could exploit to get me past your front door, and then, in truth, I'd underestimated how deep the roots of enmity between the great Houses of Minrathous run. If you are at war with another Magister, your slaves are at war with theirs as well – their fates are far more closely intertwined with yours than those of liveried Orlesian servants. The racial angle that had served me so well in Orlais did not serve here, and thus, for the best part of five years, my agents paced around your mansion with only Cassius' agents as entertainment…It proved fortuitous, in the end, because it was the frenzy of their activity upon Leliana's arrival to trumpet something greater than the eluvian was afoot.'

'Why greater than the eluvian…Oh bollocks,' the human sighed. 'Radonis.'

Solas nodded. 'Yes. If Radonis himself had been satisfied that the eluvian was the plan, he would have ordered Cassius to stand down. He didn't – in fact, Radonis' impromptu visit to your mansion made Cassius act with rage induced recklessness. In watching him watch you, I learned not only of Morrigan's presence, but of what part she was to play in either killing me or rendering me tranquil; I learned that Leliana had her son, and where she held him…and Dorian,' the elf said, 'think well on whether knowing more than that I learned this all by Cassius' ham fisted approach is truly not enough...'

Dorian looked at his hands, his will threatening to falter…Still, he had come too far to turn from the truth now. 'I need to hear you say it, Solas,' he weakly said. 'As I am assured you know, the doubt is worse.'

'I've led you too far for doubt now,' Solas returned, sadly. 'I could not find the truth by entering your house, so the truth had to somehow have left your house on its own…If hearing Altus Hadrian's name from me rather than trusting your own deductions will give you some measure of peace, I've no reason to not speak it. Still, I should not think it is the name you needed – you seek a why, and that I cannot offer, for I had neither the time nor the interest to learn it.'

'Indeed,' Dorian whispered. 'Why would you have…'

'Because parts or all of what I had learned could have been wrong, hence leading me into a trap of even greater consequence than the one I believed I was avoiding – and what do you know, they were,' the elf replied, in cold self-irony. 'It was foolish of me to think that you would trust your friend with everything...'

'No, no,' the human outright laughed, though he felt all he'd ever assumed true – of the world, of himself, of Lexi, had suddenly dissolved to toxic sludge, and settled in the pit of his chest. 'I…we,' he chuckled, 'did trust him with everything; it is simply that I and Maevaris did not agree to Vel's blood magic entrapment until, learning of our original plans, you made your first move. For what is even better,' Dorian added, 'had you not moved when and as you did, Radonis would not have pointed us to the dragon relics. We'd not have gone to Seheron; you'd not have weakened the veil…'

'Lexi did tell Cassius all that he knew,' Dorian ended, in a pained whimper. 'It is simply he didn't know everything. And here I was,' he breathed out, 'ready to blame you for all the tactical mistakes that might sink all of Thaedas, when in fact I destroyed us all with…with pillow talk?'

'You…' the elf began; for the first time since their paths had crossed, the fury in Dorian's eyes cut him short.

'If you say that I was warned, I swear by all the fucked-up would-be Gods of this accursed universe that I will slap you,' Dorian hissed.

'It will hurt you more than it does me,' Solas replied, an undertone of caution in his voice, despite the fact that the human had buried his face in his hands. 'It was still me attacking you,' he said, with awkward, unpractised kindness. 'Of all the reasons for which mistakes are made, love and trust are the most forgivable, I find…You're not the root of this, I meant to say. If I had mustered the courage of killing Veldrin five years ago…'

Dorian huffed out a pained chuckle. 'Do you finally wish you had?'

'No, I still do not,' the other quietly said. 'Logically, I know I should have, but that would have made my quest void…What would be the point of restoring the world of my people have been, if I started it by slaying the one I truly see as the best among them?'

'You…' the elf whispered, 'might think that my blatant disapproval of your friendship with Veldrin was sexual possessiveness, and part of it…Part of it was, despite your obvious disinclination for women; no man in love,' he followed, in the same quiet voice, 'wants the object of their affection to be so close to another man, and, given the fact that I had to fight my lust for her so hard, and I felt her desire for me as burning fire, hearing you laugh with her, seeing you touch even her hand…Still, the true danger in your closeness was the fact that the more she knew you, the more she came to think that this world can be shared, because men such as yourself would share it.'

'Which is not true,' Solas said, 'yet, because you are, despite your heritage, a good man, she does not see it. She never will, until it is too late – the very air my people need to thrive is poisonous to you. Your entire race is lethal to us, regardless of whether you are good or evil, but Veldrin will never accept that, and so, I should have killed her…Not tormented her, or allowed her to so torment herself. It was my love and sincere admiration for her that led us all here, Dorian; do not add to my crimes by letting me torment you with guilt over having loved and trusted, too.'

The human stood and walked away, not knowing whether the slowness of his pace had been deliberate. He did not even have the strength to nod, nor to turn on himself when he heard his name in a low whisper; all he could muster strength for was standing, with his eyes closed.

'What is it, Solas,' he uttered, in a barely audible voice.

'I told you I do not know a why,' the elf said, 'but, for the kindness that you've shown, I can offer this – my agents did assure me, at the time, that Altus Hadrian did not surrender you with ease. In fact, I think the wording they used was that the breath your secrets were uttered upon came very close to being his last.'

Dorian bit his lower lip to the blood. 'Thank you,' he said.

'Please, for your sake and Veldrin's, don't return here.'

The human could think of no reason why he would.

1 One of the Seven Creators of the Elvhen Pantheon, the God of Knowledge and, later, Secrets. I am using him, although it is pedantic, because he's the only other Elvhen God whose name is used in cursing. Fen'Harel is obviously more popular in that department (May the Dread Wolf take you! is quite the staple for 'Fuck You!' in Dalish folklore), but Dirtha-ma (literally, May you learn) is a far greater insult, and it's considered so nasty it's rarely uttered.

2 The Great Huntress, another one of the Creator set. She and Solas have, ahem, history.

3 Appraiser of Slavery in Tevinter religion, one of the Old Gods.

4 Ceremonial face marking, still used by the Dalish today; it shows one's allegiance to a specific deity.

5 Father of all Fire, Creators set.

6 Mother of Invention, Creators set.

Sorry, we know it's long, but one can hardly compress ten millennia of history is less than 10k words. Tolkien took the entirety of Silmarillion to do it, and we are not Tolkien, though we wish we were.

Thank you for reading,

Abstract & Ivi