II.
Despite his quiet guarded nature, and direct pointed words, he had delivered her through the fade and returned her to her abandoned form unharmed. Even if that form had later been chained and bound and relentlessly interrogated for hours, he had fulfilled his end of the bargain; though to what ends she could not have been sure. In truth, she had come to believe that she had conjured him, herself; that she had created him as a means of freeing herself from what had appeared to be, at the time, as an impossible prison. He had been calm and dutiful. Apparently, that had been all she had needed in order to return to the mortal plain from whence she'd come. It had made as much sense as anything else that had landed her into the waiting lap of the fledgling Inquisition.
Resigned to this, it was not until his eyes had met hers for the first time in Haven, grim as Cassandra had brought her to stand ignorant and defiant before a large rift outside the Temple of Sacred Ashes, that she had accepted that he was indeed incredibly real. And she was not the only one that had recognized him. The magic that had formed the anchor within the palm of her right hand, a magic she had not yet come to completely understand, had also known him. It had pulsed its acquiescence at once, tendrils of green energy trailing towards him as though reaching for a waiting lover. Solas...
That singular moment had rendered her at even greater odds with the world, and she had stood motionlessly as he had reached for her wrist and urged her to hold her hand both stretched out and prostrate in order to close the recent tear in the veil. The anchor, knowing she did not yet have enough power in reserve, had naturally attempted to tap into his mana pool, instead. She had sensed it's coaxing, it's power gliding against his until he had allowed it in, and as their energies had suddenly merged the connection to him had been both unexpected and intense. Their powers had become inexplicably bound and as their auras had begun pulsing in unison, she had felt it as they had both begun to build, their energies pooling into one another until it had finally coursed through her as a single conduit and released itself through the anchor to seal the greater expanse of the breach.
Panting, the entirety of it had brought her trembling to her knees, and it had only been with Cassandra's help that she had been able to return to a standing position. As she had regained her footing in the mud, she had felt Solas' apology long before it had actually whispered through the unwinding thread that had still loosely connected them through the fade.
"Ir abelas," he had said. "I will be more careful in the future."
And with that, he had cut his ties to her and left her alone with nothing but her own thoughts,once more. But the intimacy of it, the act of having another mage's essence within her as though she were merely a cup to carry water, had left her flushed and slightly aroused. She had wondered if it had been the same for him. Had she inadvertently, and very nearly, seduced him there where he had stood?
There was little that the whole of Thedas understood less than the elves and the mages. How would the humans amongst them have reacted if they had serendipitously fallen upon each other, and without so much as a long introduction, made love amongst the emerging daemons? She had doubted it would have done much to win them over to her side, but perhaps it would have cured her of her early curiosity of Solas. Perhaps it would have changed the course of everything.
Who was this mage that had found her in the fade when she had no longer known herself? Why did her magic respond to him as though he were every bit as much a part of it as she was?
Those burning questions had lead her down a path that would bind her to him for an eternity. But even on her death bed many years hence, she would still swear to anyone that asked that he had been worth it. Even if it had cost her her heart. And a good deal of her soul...