CW on this chapter for more violence than usual and some body horror.

I edited this a lot and it's become one of my favorite chapters, so I hope you enjoy it, too.

To the Void

There was a partial key to the cipher Widris had used in the back of the journal. Partial because water had ruined half the page - but it was enough for Bull and Solas to begin decoding both the journal and the Veilfire messages we had found. By the time Solas was well enough to join us in a fight, we had a possible location.

I continued to put off questioning Solas for several reasons, any or none of which might have been true. Privacy was limited in camp, and the conversation might be very private. He was still recovering from his illness. The things we found in the journal upset him nearly as much as the time magic we had discovered in Redcliffe. It simply didn't feel like the right time.

Would there ever be a right time?

"Beyond the Fade," Dorian scoffed as we sat around the fire the evening before we were to hunt down our rogue mage. "That doesn't even mean anything. The Fade is endless! I think this Widris, whoever they are, was imbibing either very right or very wrong alchemical nostrums."

"Very right?" I repeated skeptically.

I stared in his general direction until he finally remembered to put his expression into words: "Ruinous for one person can be good, clean fun for another," he huffed.

Much more worryingly, Solas didn't say anything and looked grim - I was sitting beside him, so I could see his expression with near-perfect clarity, even if I hadn't been able to feel it through our bond.

"What concerns you?" I asked him in a low voice.

"'Beyond' need not refer to either a literal or figurative location," he said. "There are...other readings of its meaning."

"What, blood magic?" Dorian asked. "No offense to Widris's ability to perform basic logic, but this doesn't seem the best spot to acquire victims for ritual bloodletting."

I watched Solas pull his face together into a mask of serenity. "Indeed. Let us hope it is no worse than poorly-thought-out blood magic."

It was clear - to me, anyway - that he had something fairly specific in mind, but I failed to ask him about that, too. There were so many things that I wasn't asking that I half feared if one slipped out, it would breach the dam.

I held him close that night and slept - and didn't ask.

Creators help me, I should have asked.

The location was four hours - or a little more - away from our camp, mostly in the direction we had taken to reach the fort. That meant we had to take supplies to last us overnight, in case we weren't able to return in a single day for any reason. The routine was becoming as familiar as it was tiresome, but it was too early for coherent complaints as we packed up, so we did it with only an air of general resentment.

Because I was part of that air, I nearly missed the time Solas and Cole spent speaking privately in urgent, hushed whispers - or whispers that were urgent and Solas's side, anyway. Far more hushed on Solas's side as well - I managed to catch Cole telling him: "I promise. It's not - it's not a good way to die."

And then, because I couldn't simply let that go and not listen in on Solas's response, I stepped a little closer and managed to hear him say, heavily: "That is what I always suspected - and feared."

"You did try to tell her," Cole said plaintively. "She wouldn't listen."

"I know, Cole - thank you. Let us speak of it no further."

Luckily they moved off in the opposite direction - likely, I realized later, precisely because Cole had known I was there - and so my pretense of innocence wasn't put to any tests.

The road we took was beginning to become as familiar as packing up far more than we probably needed merely because it was impossible to do anything efficiently in a bog. As the morning wore on and we all began to wake up, I amused myself listening, for a while, to Sera and Bull come up with plans for making living siege engines out of elves sitting atop Qunari shoulders. After they drifted into silence, I tried to put together the four whole lines of conversation I had overheard with other things I knew of Solas to reach some sort of conclusion.

Impossible, of course - someone close to him had died for something, her death had apparently been bad, and it had also, possibly, been unnecessary or ineffective. The landscape around me - the one I could see almost none of - contained more concrete details than Solas's past.

The morning was nearly over when we finally reached one of the pillar-topped hills, at which point our path split from the road. Bull told me there was a faint track leading toward a series of rock formations perhaps a mile distant. That was where the journal indicated our mage had been arranging a long-term camp.

"Do the rocks look...weirdly regular to you?" he asked the others.

"Less regular than the basalt columns on the Storm Coast," Cassandra replied without much interest, seemingly reflecting the lack of interest of Sera and Blackwall, as well - at least until Cole began to speak.

"She called for power," he whispered, "but it burned so cold even the rocks recoiled, revolted, revolting, resistant to being unmade."

"Yeah," Bull said flatly, "that makes me feel a lot better."

"Cole?" Solas asked.

"I have to stay here," the boy-shaped spirit announced.

"Why?" Cassandra demanded.

"Blood magic is efficient for binding spirits," Dorian mused, "though I don't quite know what to call you, Cole, or whether you might be particularly - "

"It's not blood magic," Cole interrupted. "Ask Solas. He has ideas, though no answers."

Everyone's attention shifted almost palpably in that direction. "Few ideas," Solas told us shortly, "and none of them good, I fear. Cole cannot truly speak of this, because it is anathema to spirits. It cannot be directly reflected in the Fade. All my knowledge - if one can call tenuous guesses knowledge - comes from second- or third-hand accounts and books, whether physical or Fade reflections."

"Enough riddles and caveats, Solas," Cassandra told him impatiently. "What are we facing?"

"It is theorized that immense power can be drawn from the Void. In theory, this power can be used to manipulate the Fade, casting the elemental spells familiar to us with far more intensity and force." Solas paused. "Worse, it may allow for other kinds of spells, spells we have never seen, against which we can prepare no defenses."

"How? Why ?" Cassandra demanded.

"We don't have time for an introductory course on metaphysics," Solas replied testily, biting off the words. "I will happily offer up every theory I have encountered after we are past the crisis. But for now - if she has already begun reshaping the world to such a degree, we have arrived only just in time, if we have arrived in time at all. Moreover, my theories will do us no good in stopping - "

He cut off abruptly, and though I was too far away to see his face, I interpreted the silence as stunned. "There is one possibility. Well. A hypothesis only - still, we may be glad of the Anchor before the day is finished." He addressed me. "Inana, do you think you would be able to open a rift?"

I glanced down at my left hand and flexed it. "Perhaps?" I replied. "If there's already a tear, I think I could pull it open further. But why would I want to?"

"Any unusual ability provided by the Anchor may be used as a weapon - to disorient, if nothing else," he lied. I gave his blurred form a hard look, but didn't call him out - not in front of everyone.

"Perhaps demons pouring from a rift would attack Widris, but they would also attack us ," I observed, though the observation shouldn't have been necessary.

"A last resort, of course," he said, still lying.

"At least we're familiar with fighting demons," Dorian offered.

"Precisely," Solas agreed, pleased - but also still lying. He turned without another word and started off down the hillside before I could think of a way to challenge him covertly. Why was he lying? What was he lying about ?

Cassandra took my arm as my mind continued to worry at the doubts Solas's lies raised, and the rest of us followed him.

"I have a bad feeling about this, Boss," Bull muttered from near my shoulder.

I laughed without humor. "Well, I'm fairly certain that makes all of us, then."

"Have you ever heard of what he speaks of?" Cassandra asked me.

I sighed, hating that I would have to let Solas's lies stand, but unable to call him out when I didn't even really know what he was trying to cover up. "Dalish magic is extremely practical. We...don't go in for a lot of theory."

"We do," Dorian said unhappily, "and I've never heard of anyone calling on the Void for power. And when was the last time you heard of a magister who turned down the chance for more power?"

"What are you saying?" Blackwall asked from somewhere behind us.

"Either Solas and Cole are both wrong, or this is so horrifying even a magister would balk at reaching for it," Dorian sighed. "And given our luck in the 'horrifying magic' department, I wouldn't put money on it being the first one."

"You know how I said before that maybe magic wasn't total shite?" Sera spoke up abruptly. "Yeah, this is me taking it back, right?"

I couldn't find it within myself to blame her.

The rock formations soon loomed close enough that I could make them out as dark shapes against the lighter sky, and there was something strange on the wind. I raised my face, trying to identify it.

"Yeah, I smell it too," Bull rumbled behind me. "Doesn't smell much like a bog, does it? Doesn't smell much like anything."

He was right, and somehow that absence of anything was...disturbing.

Then my hand began to spark. "I think there's a rift nearby," I said.

Solas breathed a sigh that sounded a great deal like relief and turned to face us. "I fear I have very little advice. Do not expect this to be routine. Do not expect predictability. Do not attempt to attack her while you have her attention. Should it land on you...run. If you see her attention on one of the others, attack."

"Running isn't what Blackwall, Bull, and I are here for," Cassandra protested as Solas turned away again.

"If we do not take care, we may well find that none of us is here to do anything other than die," he responded over his shoulder.

Cassandra looked at me, her face a mask of consternation, and I stared back with equal dismay. Solas was grim, always, but not usually about our odds of survival - just about whether our survival would ultimately mean anything.

The rock formation was looming over us by then - a solid wall, I could now see, that Bull claimed was a smooth curve, or at least near enough smooth to look strange. The path led through a gap in the wall and then disappeared, depositing us in a...space. I couldn't say much more about it. There was dead-looking grass under my feet, and a haze of black particles hung in the air. The haze was almost like smoke or ash, catching in the backs of our throats and making us cough, but it smelled of nothing in particular - a sensation which began to wear on me sooner than I would have thought possible. Before I fully understood what I was doing, I had dropped my face to Cassandra's shoulder, breathing in the familiar smells of metal, oil, and leather. I realized a moment later that she had bent a little to smell my hair.

It was just...nothing quite felt real within that wall of stone, and without my senses reassuring me that I was there, I felt as though I might disappear.

A hand touched my arm. Solas had come back, and he gently pulled me away from Cassandra. "Spread out a little, but no one go alone - this place is too disorienting."

"What will you do with the Inquisitor?" Cassandra demanded.

"I believe - I hope - that the power of the Anchor will be as much a surprise to Widris as anything she can call up is for us," he said, and it was still a lie - he had something very specific in mind, I could tell that much. "But Inana needs to be at close range to discharge the Anchor to best effect."

"You will protect her with your life," Cassandra said. It wasn't a question or a request.

"Always, Seeker," he replied. At least that part wasn't a lie, I supposed. "The rift is at the center of this…gap. I imagine that is where we will find the mage." And he led me away.

I wanted to ask about the lie - I wanted to - but dread was rising in my throat, and when I opened my mouth to speak, all that emerged was a brief coughing fit.

The rift at the center of the space was unlike any other I had ever seen, and soon it arrested my attention. The Fade flowed out at a steady rate, but any demons that were pulled through were immediately disintegrated and freed back into the atmosphere within the spell circle containing both the rift and the Fade energy that issued from it. Within the circle, my vision was clear and sharp.

Between us and it was another sort of border - wards, but with other spells I couldn't even name woven through until the whole thing was a headache-inducing tangle. Within that boundary, I could also...see. In a manner of speaking. In a manner of speaking that left me feeling ill.

If the Fade was light, whatever was contained within the wards was the inverse of light. Not darkness - that was merely light's absence. This was...wrong. Everything it illuminated, it also corrupted. If the Fade revealed to me the intention of objects, this revealed to me their ultimate ends, and, at the same time, drank away all meaning from those ends.

I knew the world within the ward through the futility of its ever having existed at all.

And within the ward - a figure, standing directly under the rift, drinking in both the Fade energies it released while also having, somehow, woven shards of meaninglessness into her very soul. Widris, I supposed. Her body was emaciated, and, as I watched, she turned towards us, her face contorted in a smile-like rictus of ecstatic nihilism. Her gums were black, and black bled down onto her teeth. And her eyes…

She...didn't have eyes. Gaping black holes in her face bore claw marks that I suspected were from her own broken, blackened nails. Her tongue darted out, snake-like and longer than any human's tongue should be, shockingly red against her dark gums and darkening teeth.

Then she spoke, her voice purring and clanging at the same time: "Now you're an interesting curiosity, aren't you? Full of curiosity, too. They kept me from seeing the darkness, and so I swallowed them - put them somewhere they would do some good. Now all they see is darkness."

It took me a blessed moment of continued ignorance before I understood. Her eyes. She had ripped out and swallowed her eyes .

She giggled.

I gagged.

A mistake. She struck without further warning, and if her spell had been any less powerful and ponderous, I wouldn't have reacted fast enough. As it was, it was terribly - terrifyingly - difficult to access the Fade and shift with Solas. Instinctively, I pulled us back, away from the ward.

"What the fuck is happening, Solas?" I demanded as we stumbled from the protective embrace of the spell.

"She is calling the Void into this world, unmaking it, and using that unnatural unmaking to pull far more of the Fade energies into herself than she ought to be able to hold - or control," he told me in a swift undertone. "Though I haven't see it before this moment, it conforms to certain theories that...have been discussed for many ages."

It made no sense, but there was no time for more. "Now, now, that is hardly fair," the bronze-edged voice cooed. "Tell me where you are, little wellspring. Let me - ah!" The sound was high-pitched with girlish surprise. "Now what are you?"

There was a shriek - Sera's - thinning to a babbling wail, and then Dorian was bellowing something as he let loose a spell. I didn't even need to watch to know it would be batted aside as easily as a halla might bat aside a falling leaf with her horns.

"We must reach the rift," Solas told me, ignoring that our friends were battling for their lives - and losing.

"How?" I demanded. "Her wards - " My protest died as I felt Dorian release another spell, and heard Widris laugh with demented delight.

"Are largely to contain the Void energies, and those of the Fade," he replied. "We can move through them, and through the energies beyond. For short periods. Probably."

"And what happens if you're wrong?" I demanded.

Dorian cried out. Then Blackwall directly after. I couldn't see them through the haze, and yet I could feel them growing smaller, their auras emptying of color and purpose.

"That is what happens - what you are sensing now," Solas replied, holding my gaze. "They will die - worse than die - if we do nothing. Shift us. Take us as near her wards as you can."

What else was I to do? I reached for the Fade and waited as it came to me with excruciating slowness, flowing into my hand like honey rather than in the hot torrent I usually received.

"Where did you go, hmm?" Widris crooned as I waited, her voice coming nearer. "Your tricks aren't fair - didn't I already tell you I couldn't see?"

Too slow - I was closing the distance between where I stood in the waking world and the Fade much too slowly. Widris was going to find us, catch us, and then everyone would -

I heard Bull's battle cry, and caught sight of Cassandra's aura. They were flanking Widris, attacking and retreating in a pattern meant to adhere to Solas's advice to run once her attention was drawn. It couldn't possibly work for long - but I had grasped hold of the Fade, and I wrapped it around myself and Solas, sending us back to the edge of Widris's wards.

Without hesitation, he grabbed my shoulder, propelling me through the wards ahead of him.

If I had believed the gap outside the wards terrible, it was nothing compared to the area within the wards. Reality still existed - barely - but all of it had been stripped entirely of meaning. Direction, time, objects, emotions - all seemed to howl past my ears with screaming despair. The very bond I shared with Solas tugged at me like a noose. Of what possible use could it be when all he did was lie to me - to all of us - seemingly on a whim? What could our feelings mean in the face of his deceptions?

I tried to step forward, to hold to my purpose, but…of what use was purpose in the face of, not just death, but erasure ? All my love was fruitless, because none of it could halt, or even stall, the inevitable march of destruction that was the fate of every living thing.

A laugh caught in my throat as I felt my substance beginning to dissolve into the ultimate end of the Void. Good. Good . I had failed my clan, failed my people, and now I would fail the Inquisition and the rest of the world. Good. Let it all dissolve into the Void. Nothing Corypheus would do could have meaning then anyway. Abject failure was the only hope for success.

My left hand sparked abruptly, sending a jolt of pain up my arm - and it was real. Both of Solas's hands immediately closed on my left, as though he had felt the spark, too, and he cradled it against his chest. "We can't do this!" he said, his voice coming in gasps like sobs. "We aren't - we can't."

The pain of the Anchor had, for a moment, pushed aside the numbness of despair. "You're right," I agreed, wrapping my right arm around his waist, pulling the left from his grasp and holding it before us, letting the Anchor lead us. It guided us away from the center of the Void-space and the rift contained at its heart, back into the still-unraveling reality beyond the wards.

Solas and I were both panting - half sobbing - when we emerged. "Ir abelas," he was already gritting out through clenched teeth as we stumbled past the wards. His expression was furious, though none of his anger was directed at me. "Ir'el abelas, ma vhenan. Ir - ir abelas."

"The Anchor," I said, cutting him off, even though I was sympathetic to his attempt at a never-ending apology. "What if I discharged the Anchor at or in the Void-space? The Anchor is connected directly to the Fade, and Fade-energy is what it collects."

His head came up and he stared at me for three rapid heartbeats. "There isn't enough energy contained within the Anchor for that," he told me. "You might disrupt it enough for us to make our way to the rift, but it would be a terrible gamble. The piece of the Void held by Widris herself, however…"

"How?" I demanded.

"Bring her here, and I will tell you when the moment is most opportune," he replied.

I heard her mad croon some distance off, though I couldn't make out the words. "Widris!" I yelled, choking again on the haze in the air and finding myself silenced by a brief coughing fit.

Thankfully I had, apparently, drawn sufficient attention. "My sweet little wellspring," her voice trilled, coming closer, cracking a bit on the word sweet. "Give yourself to me and I will drink you dry."

"I'm here," I managed to rasp, straightening my shoulders and holding my left hand out toward her. "Come find me."

This time, she didn't bother with any conventional spell. This time, the Void itself unfurled inside her, and I was instantly thrown back into that place of desperate meaninglessness - but my left hand seemed to be held aloft by the Anchor, and it never wavered. "Now," Solas said in my ear, his voice steady, and I discharged the Anchor, releasing all its stored energies as I had once in the mines beneath Haven, and never since.

The blast struck her the very instant she began to release her own spell and the effect was immediate. It countered her spell, and then ripped through her, too, filling the Void she held until it overflowed, and it continued on, washing through her body, returning her to reality. Small remnants of the energy I had unleashed rippled out around her, but they were too small, by then, to even begin to overcome the horrors she had unleashed.

She stumbled forward through the still-pervasive haze with a cry, and I could see her when she fell to her knees, blood once again red and flowing - around her nails, her teeth, from the gaping pits where her eyes had been.

Solas stepped forward, his hand reaching out. His fingers cupped her face almost tenderly as he stopped beside her shivering form, and for a breath I believed he might heal her. Instead he spoke: "You fool," he said softly, and there was pity in his voice and in the bond between us, but no compassion.

Then he broke her neck.