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For some reason I woke up at 5:45 this morning?
Taarsidath-an Halsaam
"What do we do about it?" I asked, trying to ignore the headache that the humming protrusion of red lyrium was giving me. "I'll entertain any ideas for ridding us of it short of calling forth the Void to unmake it."
I felt Solas's quickly-stifled urge to lecture on that subject, and though I didn't know precisely what he would have said, I thought I had a good guess.
After draining Crestwood's lake and closing the rift in the caves - and Deep Roads - beneath, we had turned our attention to the red templar camp in the foothills. It turned out they had taken over the abandoned mine in order to grow red lyrium, though it was unclear to me if they were growing it within people as I had observed in future-Redcliffe, or if there were some other method. In ridding the mine of templars, we had also ended up fighting a wyvern and her brood, which had at least pleased Bull. Now we needed a way to deal with the lyrium before we began attempting to secure every other abandoned mine in Thedas to keep them from gaining such a foothold elsewhere - which was what we would have to do if we actually wanted curtail their activities. Never mind that doing so was, of course, utterly impossible. At best we might make their task more difficult by securing mines near cities and trade routes, but even that could easily prove a larger task than we had resources for.
It was possible my headache wasn't just caused by the red lyrium currently taunting me.
"Have we tried fire?" Dorian asked, only half joking. I had told everyone else to wait at the bottom of the path even though, theoretically, they would all be less susceptible to lyrium than we mages were. Unfortunately, they also had no way to safely handle the stuff. We had means by which to examine and move it without touching it physically. The four of us had prodded the outcroppings left behind by the templars cautiously with our magical senses. I didn't know if anyone else got a headache from it, but the humming was almost visible to me, giving everything I could already barely see a sick-making halo of devastating possibilities. It hadn't been nearly so bad in future-Redcliffe, where the presence of the Fade had - apparently - negated some of the visual effects that plagued me.
"Fire," Vivienne scoffed. "It's still lyrium , darling. Do you really want it to explode?"
"No," Dorian replied, "of course not. But she did say any ideas short of calling forth the Void. And there are ways to contain explosions."
"I believe shields that strong usually require blood magic," Vivienne retorted, her tone pointed enough to say Tevinter without actually saying it.
"To cleanse red lyrium?" I said. "I would consider sacrificing a portion of my own blood, if no other options presented themselves," I told Vivienne. "The lyrium is evil, and it spreads."
"And so you fight evil with more evil?" she demanded, the sneer undoubtedly on her face evident in her voice.
"There is nothing inherently evil in blood magic, if the blood is given freely," Dorian retorted. "Even the southern Chantry recognizes as much. As long as the Inana isn't asking others to make such a sacrifice - "
Solas's voice cut through the increasingly heated disagreement. "This argument has nothing to do with the subject at hand," he pointed out. "There are ways other than blood magic to form such a barrier - if, for example, we had nigh three hundred mages at our disposal who could layer their barriers atop each other."
"Would fire work?" I asked him. "Or - I suppose you don't know any more about it than the rest of us. Do you think it has a chance of working?"
He hesitated, thinking the question through. "Even the Blight cannot survive a hot enough fire," he said, "so I think it would be worth trying, yes - but fire cannot cleanse the soil, water, and air, at least not in a practical sense. You must seek other solutions, and mages are not the appropriate group to study such a topic."
"Dwarves," I said at the same time Vivienne said, "Tranquil."
"Both," Solas replied.
"Between Varric's contacts and the Tranquil who have already joined the Inquisition, we can probably manage both," I mused. "Let's head down now. This stuff is making me sick, and we need to see how much Varric can help us. And send more ravens." We had been sending a lot of ravens.
"I wonder if the dwarves would have ideas for shielding red lyrium," Dorian said thoughtfully as we descended. Solas had guided me on the way up, but Dorian claimed my arm before my love could do so for the trip back down, and I had no objection to walking with my friend instead. "They shield regular lyrium, after all, and if we knew there were physical substances that could block its effects…"
"That could be useful," I agreed. "Varric does have contacts in the Carta, from what I understand. Add it to the list of questions."
"Though, generally speaking, I am fully in favor of good questions, I confess I am beginning to wish our list of questions were a little shorter, and our list of answers a little longer," Dorian sighed.
"As do we all, my dear," Vivienne murmured from behind us.
Whatever Solas claimed about good sense, good information seemed to me a resource in even shorter supply.
Varric didn't know all the details of lyrium-shielding off the top of his head, but he knew of at least two alloys that worked for periods of time. "Though," he added, "dragon bones are the best material - supposedly - especially from the cold-breathing kind. I've heard that lyrium in crates shielded by the bones of a Kaltenzahn were found centuries later after an old thaig was rediscovered, and the bone was still fully intact - but that might just be Carta legend."
The entire table shook as Bull smacked it - or set his mug down, or something - gleefully. We had more or less taken over the balcony of the Rusted Horn for the evening, and he was at the other end of the table from me - virtually indistinguishable from our surroundings. "Sounds like we got lots of good reasons to go dragon hunting, Boss!"
"It does," I allowed, "though we'll have to put it off a little longer yet…" I rubbed my forehead, trying to work out a timeline. "Leliana says the Carta is working out of an old dwarven trading outpost in the Hinterlands. Her spies haven't been able to gain access to it, and the dwarves are being particularly cagey about what they're moving through. She thinks it's red lyrium. Then there's a mine in the region that went quiet recently. We need to stop and look into all that on our way back to Skyhold. There might be time after, depending on when Hawke and Stroud send word, but we won't want to go too far east. It might be time to scout the Dirthavaren - Josephine is concerned about the civil war in Orlais and...the threat we uncovered," I finished carefully, knowing better than to speak openly of the threat to Empress Celene's life.
Everyone was silent for a moment. "Where the frig is Dirt-a-varren?" Sera demanded.
Oh. "Ir abelas," I sighed. "Dirthavaren is what my people call the - the plains. Where the Dales fell?" I suddenly couldn't remember what the Chantry had called their attack on my people. The Grand March? Holy March? Those didn't seem right.
"The Exalted Plains," Blackwall told me, not unkindly.
Exalted March.
"Vows violated," Cole whispered. "Visions of sovereignty squandered. The land loved their footsteps - it never wanted to wallow in their blood."
"Eolasan, Cole. Ma serannas," I said quietly to the spirit before returning my attention to Blackwall. "Exalted, of course - thank you." I could feel Solas's eyes on my face and his sympathy through our bond, and his arm slipped briefly around my waist when I wouldn't look at him. "Celene and Gaspard both have armies vying for control of the region," I went on, sidestepping the name, "and there are already some reports of undead walking thanks to the conflict and the rifts. It's not something we should ignore, and dealing with it may give us leverage with both sides."
"Useful, no doubt, whenever the inevitable peace talks occur," Vivienne allowed. "The Inquisition should at least have a presence there, though it would be even better if we were in a position to mediate."
"Josephine has similar thoughts," I agreed. "But, in any case, all of that is why we will have to put off dragon hunting for the moment. Ir abelas , Bull."
I should have paid better attention to Varric's beliefs about jinxing things.
We were coming from the east, and therefore ended up taking the road into the Hinterlands that Dorian, Solas, Blackwall, Varric and I had ridden the day we left to meet with Alexius. We arrived in the evening and were forced to camp in the same ravine where Solas had healed my shoulder. In spite of discovering my bond to Solas that day, the camp was not one I remembered especially fondly, but it turned out to be fortuitous anyway. There was a cave - a passage through the rock - near the far end of the ravine leading to the valley at the base of the hill where the mine we sought was - or had been - located.
It was late when we arrived - or it felt late, thanks to the short winter days - and was bitterly cold. We had been riding through snow all day. At least, I supposed, the snow made the ravine completely unrecognizable to me considering it had only ever been a blur of color to begin with, and now all the colors were entirely changed. We were all sharing tents again - Solas and I had Cole and Dorian, and so I was free to start a fire with the wood Cole, Blackwall, and Bull brought me while Solas and Dorian put up the tent.
"I smell burning," Bull said as he set the first logs down near where I was still constructing my tinder and kindling into something that would catch the first time. "Does anyone else smell burning?"
"There's probably a smelter on site, Tiny," Varric pointed out.
"Would it be running this late? And in a mine that's supposedly stopped producing?" Iron Bull asked.
"We don't actually know that it has stopped producing, or what it might still be producing," Dorian pointed out. "That is, in fact, what we are here to determine."
"Yeah, all right." Bull subsided as I grounded my staff and called for a spark of flame. Fire was my worst element, but I could channel it if I had sufficient mana and concentrated hard enough, and making the evening fire was something I could do without tripping or spilling anything.
Once our campfire was burning, we were soon gathered around it trying to stay warm as we ate dinner, quickly retiring to our tents and bedrolls afterward, though conversation continued to flow for quite some time. In my own tent, Solas and Dorian were continuing an argument started on the road about the use of the Fade for travel within both time and to alternate timelines . It would probably have been interesting to me if they had been writing down the equations they were tossing back and forth, but I couldn't keep all the variables and constants straight in my head without seeing them, so I was a little lost. I curled up against Solas's side, content with his fingers stroking my hair, and was soon wandering in the Fade they were arguing about.
I dreamt of Solas again - the same dream, the one I had continued having over the last few weeks, ever since the night we discussed my opinion of the Wardens. The insubstantiality of my own hand still startled me awake every single time, but I was beginning to understand what was wrong with Solas's face. It was something about his skin - its texture or its color, even though he looked very much as he did now. Just...younger. I still couldn't shake the feeling that it was missing something - a feeling which grew increasingly frustrating each night I dreamed the scene again. But it wasn't as though I could control my dreams, or question them, or do anything other than observe what happened and try to understand it.
We rose early the next morning, hoping to surprise any enemies that might be awaiting us at the mines across the valley, and found our way to the passage down before dawn. "Cole, Sera, Varric," I said, and they slipped into the shadows, needing no further direction. The rest of us waited, shivering but knowing better than to make a fire, as the light slowly grew.
Without warning, we heard a strange, scratchy, almost bird-like shriek, and all at once Cole was among us, his eyes wide and slightly wild. "Dignified, distrustful, diving down, dangerous - " he babbled, breathless.
An enormous shadow passed overhead, and we all ducked instinctively. "Dragon!" Sera shrilled, her footsteps and Varric's hitting the ground unevenly as they pelted back to our location.
"Aw, Boss," Bull said, voice saturated with glee as he hefted his enormous hammer one-handed, "you really do bring me to the nicest places."
Eolasan: I know