"How much longer?"

It was not the first time she'd asked, though Solas did not begrudge her the impatience. Hunger, fatigue, terrain and sweltering heat had all taken their toll, but no trial was greater than the fight against desire. The incense's effects were all but unbearable, and growing still.

"You said it wasn't far, and that was half an hour ago. Forty minutes. Gods, it feels like hours." She wiped her forehead with her sleeve. "How long can an entrance tunnel possibly be?!"

"Long," Solas replied, in lieu of a better answer. Between the haze of aeons past, and the inebriation of present, he could hardly remember what he'd had for breakfast the previous morning, let alone the dimensions of a building he had not seen in several millennia. "Typically, the path was entertained by both the vallasvunal, and by those individuals who chose to stop and enjoy its effects. The length was considered a feature of the experience." He turned his head to the side but came shy of actually looking at her. "And it has been twenty minutes, at most."

In response, she only groaned.

For all her complaining, the boredom had been preferable. She could not think in this state. She couldn't function. Not when every ounce of strength and focus she had to spare was set upon ensuring silence never fell too long, lest her addled mind rush to fill it with temptation.

Already her gaze had started to drift. To his bared feet first, marching on ahead of her; calves at work, firm and flexed as he climbed the steady incline. He'd rolled his breeches to his thighs to weather the heat, and from there it was an easy glide to…

Fenedhis.

She screwed her eyes shut. "Tell it to me again."

It wasn't the first time she'd asked that, either.

But he did not hesitate to answer. "The tunnel will exit into a larger gallery where the palarla is located. There will be a courtyard or garden we can approach from. The main doors are typically warded – though that is unlikely to still be the case. The censer will be just beyond the entrance, a feature of the main hall, and its lid suspended from the ceiling. Once covered it will stop producing incense, but what is already present in the area will take some time to dissipate. An hour, perhaps longer.

"When we are in sight of the entrance I will leave you at the doors. The effects will be strongest inside, and the risks higher. You will remain there until it has been put out, at which point I will convey to you that it is safe."

They'd discussed the plan enough times for her to memorise it, but that wasn't the point of asking anymore. It was to hear the mantra that followed.

"After?" she prompted, when he was finished.

And he affirmed, "After."

It had become a lifeline. A prayer, whispered softly, timed to steps and wringing hands when their thoughts – their eyes – began to stray. More often now than ever before, in this shared state of punch-drunk frustration. It was the promise on which they hung all hope of relief, and the last remaining ward against the impulse to throw themselves at each other.

There was so little strength left between them to draw upon. Over time, the thought of surrender began to feel less like failure and more like inevitability. Their resistance, pointless. A waste of time and energy stubbornly insisted upon for reasons they could barely even recall anymore. They were set upon this path before they even fell – it could only ever end in their succumbing.

The geas had only one request, and the longer they defied it, the louder it insisted. It would drive them to the very brink of madness before it let the order go unheeded.

Skin hypersensitised, growing pink and hot. Tender as a fresh bruise. Delicate as silk, catching on every itch and burr. Goosebumps rose and fell in waves, begging tics and shivers to relieve the tension. Packs chafed. Sweat drowned. Fists curled and nails pricked. With their bodies on fire even the air from a soft exhale felt like a caress; their thin underclothes as stifling and heavy as plate mail.

They were like the orchard plums of their memories: swollen, sun-ripe, and fit to burst. So eager for the touch of lips and teeth that to spill all the nectar within would take but a single bite. They longed for a taste – for relief – even knowing the harm that would come of it. No price was too high, be it the blood from their veins or their weight in gold. Even death seemed fair when weighed against the prospect of further torment.

Continuing on separately might've made it easier to bear, but was too dangerous at this stage. Neither were in fighting shape and their mental state had deteriorated to the point that they were no longer capable of navigating on their own. Travel abreast would be worse when just a careless brush of arm or hand would lead to thrall.

They settled on a walking gap. Assuring they stayed within sight of one another while guarding against accidental contact. But what at first seemed like the safest choice, soon proved to be the opposite. With twenty paces between them, they became beasts. Slavering and starved, chained before a feast they could not touch. In each heaving breath and bead of sweat they glimpsed was a promise of deliverance. Paradise, unreachable; mere steps away.

What cruelty –what injustice – to be forced to gaze from afar.

But that distance could only protect them from each other. And when pushed to the very limits of their sanity, they did as beasts are wont to do, and began to gnaw at themselves.

Indulgences were small at first, and passed without notice. Loosened ties and popped buttons. The absent picking of a stray thread. The line toed, but not yet crossed, in dragging a single nail over sensitised skin. It was not enough to dull the ache, only whet their palates, and so hands began to wander. From neck and collar, lips to ears, reddened cheek to taut throat.

Pull became tug, then rub and squeeze, hands running rough over stomach and thighs. Pointedly avoiding those places that needed the most.

Ellana toyed with her hair. Winding the curls around her fingers until it gave her scalp a pleasant tingle. Just once became twice, then a few more times, and a dozen after that… somehow, she'd gotten herself caught in a loop of repeating the motion again and again and again. Chasing the frisson it granted her.

Ahead, Solas scratched at the back of his head. Leaving raised, red, marks she could not tear her eyes from. She watched, transfixed, as his fingers curled around the back of his neck – squeezed – and raked his nails to the shoulder. Slowly and deliberately. Twisting his head back and forth to savour the sensation. Feeding his hungry skin.

A shiver ran through him. She saw it in the subtle, downward, flex of his arms. The setting of his jaw. The rise and fall of a breath, briefly held, before exhaling hard through his nose.

She thought of touching him.

Of him touching her.

Hearing that ragged breath in her ear as she eased his need with the slide of her hand, knowing he was wound so tight she could bring him to ruin with his clothes still on.

She thought of every time they played their secret games: a touch to her wrist as they passed in the hall, eyes connecting across the room, and his fingers creeping up the inside of her thigh beneath a banquet table.

She could feel it now, as though she'd dreamed it into existence, and was at once exhilarated by their (her) rebellion. Unaware, or simply unwilling to see, that the touch was from her own hands.

One plunged deep into her hair, on the hunt for prickles and sighs. The other she brought to her mouth, to suckle fingers and bite at knuckles. Taste the salt of sweat where they pressed into her tongue. When his (her) hands slid to her collar she took a long, deep, drag of thickened air and pulled her shirt down as invitation, so he (she) might cup her breasts.

She pinched herself through the fabric of her shirt, and in biting off a pleasured sound became aware of what she'd done. How far she'd strayed. But now that she'd caught her hands in the trappings of her own flesh she couldn't seem to break them free. Between her thighs there was an urgent throb. Needy, soft, and wet. It would hardly take a moment to slake…

She considered it.

Moved a hand to the laces of her breeches and let it idle there as she walked, not quite convinced to slip inside. Weighing strength of need against her better judgement (what little remained). She'd only ever touched herself in the dark. There was something deeply alluring about the thought of doing it now, here, with her lover merely steps away.

Would he notice?

Would it thrill him?

…would he join her?

The impact of a hard step caused her fingers to rub unexpectedly, friction won by chance, and the curl of pleasure it caused her was so startling she all but choked to hold back a moan. On the next, she flexed her hips. Grinding into the motion in a way that challenged any claim that it was all an accident. That felt even better. Enough, and she began to wonder just how much more she could get away with.

Her fingers curled, cupping herself through soaked linen, and pushed the metal grommets of her laces into hot, flushed, skin. Another shock of frisson followed, and suddenly all the fabric she wore felt suffocating. Too tight, too heavy, too much. She could hardly breathe beneath it.

Surely, in such terrible heat, it would be wiser to take it off. What danger could there be in baring her skin?

What danger, in baring his?

Ahead of her, none the wiser, Solas was holding clenched fists at his sides. With his knuckles blanched white and shoulders at his ears he looked ready to spring apart. She was neither embarrassed nor discouraged by his nearness as she teased herself – if anything, it emboldened her.

He would want to know. He would want to see. To play with her.

And she had always wanted to watch him…

"Solas?"

He made a quiet, questioning sound – indicating he'd heard her – but as before, he did not turn. He'd not risked a glance at her in some time.

She wet her lips. "The incense, it's– " Swallowed hard. "It's getting very difficult t-to… think. I don't know if I can keep, ah, keep…" It was even harder to speak. She could not seem to hold the words in her head long enough to arrange them in some semblance of a question. She had to close her eyes to think. "Is it possible to maybe – before the after – we could t–?"

He cut her off. "You must endure."

Rarely did he speak to her with such gravity. Or so commandingly. It should've silenced her – and might have, on any other occasion – but here it only served to kick her heart up that much faster. He'd not meant to be seductive, but with his voice so thick and low he had to know how it excited her.

He was saying, "We cannot–" but stopped and chewed on the words a while. There was power in naming what gripped them. And they were weak. He settled on a more familiar refrain instead: "It should not be much further."

But she saw through the denial to the indecision hid beneath. He was so tense – this would only do him good.He'd see. He'd understand. He so enjoyed it when she took control, and she knew just how to lead him to his bliss.

She wanted to say it plainly – watch me, my love, and let me watch you; I want to watch you – but couldn't. Not for shyness, nor any sense of propriety, but in respect to his modesty. Few things flustered him more than those few, gentle, forays she'd made toward the subject (the fantasy), and it gave her the impression he saw it as a selfish thing. A lapse in his self-control. And that embarrassment prevented him from speaking to it as candidly as she did.

She wasn't looking to make him blush, but maybe if she was gentle… If she eased him nto it.

"I didn't mean, well…" A pointed silence lied for her. "I–I know after will still be after," she assured. Then carefully, indirectly, cajoled him. "But before that, if we stop here for a moment, we could take the edge off?"

It was too indirect.

In this state of inebriation he was robbed of all ability to read between the lines, and the ambiguity only threw him off his guard. She could read his confusion with his back turned.

He slipped up.

He turned and looked at her. Tossing a frown over one shoulder as easily and thoughtlessly as if he'd not just spent the last half hour doing everything in his power not to. And the moment his eyes landed on her – on her hand hovering questioningly over the laces of her breeches, the bitten lip, the hopeful rise of brows – he understood what she was asking.

He missed his next step.

One foot skidded over a crack in the floor, catching his toe, and he pitched forward. He threw a hand out for balance, but so hard and so suddenly that the torch flew right out of it. It hit the wall beside him, bounced, and as he scrambled for a grip, he smacked the handle and sent it into a wild spin.

Veilfire did not burn like its kin but he still flinched all the same when it flew past his eyes.

There were two more attempts to grab it, both missing, before he finally managed to catch hold of the wooden handle – awkwardly and upside-down – by trapping it against the wall with his opposite elbow. There was a brief pause, and a held breath, before he was reasonably assured he and the torch were no longer in peril and straightened back up. There was pink in his ears, but no trace of fluster when his eyes met with hers. Only fog.

In breathless silence, his slackened mouth worked at something he could not quite manage to say.

He raised a hand to reach for her…

"I-I would–"

…and then clenched into a fist.

He tucked it securely behind his back and gave himself a shake. Then, "No," he said, frowning. And a second time, with more conviction, "No!"

He turned and started walking again.

But she did not miss how his pace, his breath, had quickened. The way he'd shifted, a little awkwardly, before taking off. He was tempted. And in that hesitation, there was an opportunity.

The gap between them got a little smaller as she rushed to meet his stride, not quite as careful as she'd been a moment past. "Are you saying 'no' because it wouldn't work, or because you do not want to?"

"No, that's– it would–" He struggled to find a way to answer that didn't put them at further risk. Eyes firmly on the path ahead. "The effects are not dependant on resolution. They will persist so long as the incense is present in the air."

"But if it would make it easier to bear, even for a short time… We don't have to touch each other, only–"

"Ellana."

"I can turn away if you're shy," she tried. Then added, not quite under her breath, "Though I'd much prefer not to."

It startled a laugh from him. A tense, tittering, sound halfway between amused and uncomfortable.

"It wouldn't take long, really. We'd only be stopped for a moment."

"Fenedhis, it isn't a matter of– I am not– you're–!" There were several jumbled, halting, attempts to protest before finally, "Stop talking!" he snapped. "Stop talking about it!"

She did not intend to. If he'd slow down and let her catch up she'd be able to explain it properly. She'd take him by the arm and pull him back. Make him understand. He'd see that if he set propriety aside for just a moment and take the time to listen, there was sense to it. It would bring them both relief. Joy. It was the only way.

The gap closed to arm's length. She was panting to keep up. But when she tried to reachfor his arm… nothing happened. Her own stayed curled at her chest.

For some reason, she was resisting.

She did not understand why, when all she needed was there – right there! – standing before her! Ripe and sweet and soft to touch (and oh, to taste him!). Why would she not take it? Why would she not claim it?

She moved faster. Pleading all the while. "Wait, please. Solas, slow down. I need…"

How long had it been since he'd touched her? Really touched her? How long since they'd joined, and rocked each other to release? Barely a kiss was shared over this journey, it could've been a thousand years since the last time! She'd gone mad from it. Half-crazed, without his hands on her body. He could read her gasps and sighs as music, andfor him she would sing.

But when she opened to him, what came from her lips instead was denial: "Solas, I-I'm not– I'm losing my–"

The words stuck in the back of her throat: help me. A plea for strength (for mercy!). She wanted to swallow it down. Deny it. Drown it in the warmth she would drink from him.

It caught his ear, the strangeness of it, enough to arouse concern. And when he turned again he found her standing far nearer than she should've been. It startled him. He drew back in surprise, eyes wide, one hand raised to push her away, but when he wet his lips to speak (to kiss!) no sound emerged.

He'd looked too long at her face, and could no longer quite remember why he'd wanted to deny her.

This gravity was beyond craving – beyond want or yearning – it was inevitable. Undeniable. Fate, written in the stars; carved into their bones. This geas had shown them the meaning of existence. Truth as plain as the sun rises, as imminent and precious as the air they breathed. More vital than warmth, shelter, food or water… it eclipsed all.

Touch.

Release.

To join was their purpose. To deny – to resist it – a perversion. What folly, what headstrong pride, to dare act against their own creation!

With that revelation fell the last of her chains, and once unbound, Ellana dropped her pack and torch to the floor. His own began to flicker from the tremble in his grip as he stood, paralysed in indecision, unable to do more than stare.

She closed her eyes and surged to him.

There was a snap – a spark of electricity – connecting mouths before lips met. He'd whispered something, but so quietly (so painfully) she didn't quite make it out. And neither did she notice when he lay a hand upon her chest.

Not until a spell was cast.

"Ir abelas."

Pain exploded in her breast.

Blood became knives, lungs turned to stone, and skin to glass. For a single, terrible, second she was frozen to the bone – a hollow chrysalis of ice without breath or beating heart – and in the next, shattered apart and blown backwards.

She hit the wall with the force of a cannonball, leaving behind a crater of hoarfrost and a cloud of snow stripped from her frostbit skin. There was a flash of light: dozens of vallasvunal flaring to life all at once – only to flicker, fade, and burn away. The magic lost.

She slid to the floor in a heap, where she lay stunned and wide-eyed, watching the snowflakes fade into heated air as she gawped and clawed for her stolen breath.

Once she caught it she was hit with startling self-awareness. Reality descending like a slap across the cheek (and a hot flush of embarrassment). All the shame that should've stopped her from making such a fool of herself. She would've walked through fire for the promise of a single kiss on the other side.

She would've done anything.

"I'm sorry," Solas was saying. He'd taken a knee to the floor, wincing as he shook out his frozen hand. "I have very little control. The spell was not meant to be so powerful, but it was all I could think to do to break the thrall. Are you alright?"

Weakly, "I'll live," she rasped from the floor.

It was more than she could say if he hadn't done it.

When she was able, she heaved a mighty groan and rolled onto her side to cough the last of the ice out of her lungs. Get some feeling back in her limbs. Patches of skin gone waxy white from the chill were slow to thaw to an angry, prickling, red – and left behind a sharp sting. It brought to mind every time she'd wandered a little too close to a beehive (or one of Sera's jars).

As she rubbed her chest, "Remind me never to duel you," she quipped.

It made him laugh, if somewhat sheepishly, and she huffed a chuckle of her own in return. But the mirth was short-lived: there were consequences to unleashing such a powerful force in such an ancient place. Frostbite was the least of their worries.

Fire, flood, and conflict had transformed the Highlands over thousands of years; making valleys out of mountains and turning forests to tundra. The ground had swallowed up this passage long ago, where it slept in a bed of earth beneath the rise and fall of nations, protected by the old enchantments knit into its walls. Neither molten rock nor violent quake had breached them… but no magic could allay the ravages of time forever.

And water was patient.

It slipped into chips and cracks, finding fissures, turning them to voids. Over aeons it worked, drip by drip, grain by grain, to excise the structure from the stone that once entombed it. Time had built a house of cards: an ancient hall, exquisitely preserved, held aloft in a balance of magic, might, and luck.

Until a pair of weary travellers tipped the scales.

It started with a rumble.

Ellana felt it through the floor where she crouched on hands and knees. Mistaking it for tremor, she cast a wary eye at Solas, to weigh his response, but saw his own were fixed on the ceiling. Not for modesty – the shock of cold had granted them a short reprieve – but in dawning horror at what he saw there. When she followed his gaze she saw it too.

Hairline cracks had spread beyond the crater left by her impact, fanning out in all directions like the ferning of a river delta. They followed fault lines of stress and shifted weight, up across the ceiling and back down the opposite wall, searching not for sea but a path to close a loop.

A tiny fissure opened over her head, allowing a thin stream of water to find its way inside. A chink in ancient armour. It had run down along the wall, and pooled on the floor nearby.

Solas raised a hand out toward her. The danger of proximity momentarily eclipsed by a more imminent threat. With unnerving calm, "Ellana," he said. His eyes never left the ceiling. "Come here. Slowly."

She did as she was bid, making her way to him in light, careful steps. Holding her breath as she passed over the cracks.

He took a few steps back, making space for her approach. "We need to leave this section. I fear that–"

There was a sudden, high-pitched, whistle. Air rushing through a hole in the floor.

Had they clearer heads, they might've seen it for the portent that it was and leapt into action. Realising the enchantments that protected this place had been cut through, and so dispelled. But as they were they could only stand and stare, wondering what strange circumstance had caused such a thing.

Seconds later, all the crushing force of molten rock and superheated air surged through the tiny breach. Pressure that blasted a hole straight through the floor and ceiling. It continued upward, carving a path of destruction through a thousand tonnes of rock and earth, until finding a vent beneath an underground reservoir. As it erupted, a rush of meltwaters surged back down through the newly-created channel.

The resulting explosion showered them in a spray of rubble and filled the passage with scalding steam. There was a thunderous crack, a rumble and groan, then the passage – cracked and compromised – began to shudder. Then fall.

Blinded by the clouds, Ellana did not see Solas rush to her, but she felt his hand grab hold of the back of her shirt – careful not to touch her skin – and haul her up off the floor.

"Run!"

They fled as fast as they were able, trying to outrun gravity in a fog. With their torches left behind in the chaos they followed flashes in the dark; runes of vallasvunal, like will'o'wisps, sparking in and out of existence as the walls that held them fell to pieces. They gained ground by inches, staying ahead disaster by jumping gaps and skating corners with no mind for wounded feet or their lungs on fire.

All the while Solas did not let go of her shirt.

They didn't stop until – blinded in the dark – Ellana ran headlong into rubble. The fall tore her collar from his grip, loosening the tie she'd made of her breastband laces and giving her head a jarring knock, but neither mattered with death bearing down on them.

Solas tried to cast a spell, something meant to carve a path through the debris, but with his grasp of magic compromised, he only managed to clear the air. Revealing not a collapse, but a cave-in. The passage beyond was completely destroyed.

There was no way through.

"No, no, no, no, no."

He was clawing at the rubble, shaking his head, as near to hysterical as Ellana had ever seen him. When his nails were torn to the quick he cursed, looking back over his shoulder at the cloud, fast approaching, and at Ellana. His eyes wide with a fear she'd never seen in them before.

He started to say something, but she cut him off. "Look!" she cried, pointing at the wall behind him.

Between the cracked and flashing runes, where a section of wall had split open, was an eluvian. Not standing in a frame like the others they'd seen, but embedded in the wall itself. Only partially visible where the outermost layer of rock had fallen away.

"Where does that go? Can you activate it?"

The pause might have only lasted a second, but it felt like a hundred years passed in the space between her question and the hopeful lift of Solas' brow.

"It's a back door," he said, breathless. "Some of the halls had enchantments hidden among the vallasvunal. They led to private rooms in the palarla. They were restricted by use of a key, but not physical. A spell or passphrase."

She did not need an explanation, only the assurance it led somewhere else.

"Open it!"

Another pause. Another century come and gone while his eyes searched the darkened mirror.

"I-I… I can't remember."

"But you've used it before, right? That's how you know of it?" There wasn't time for tact or delicacy. "Try to think of a specific person, a specific time you were here, something you did – anything!"

But he looked lost. Helpless, as he glanced between her and the wall. "That isn't–"

She cut him off again. "There's no time to be coy! I'm trying to help you jog your memory!"

Recoiling, "I'm not being coy!" he snapped back. It was not anger that sharpened his voice. "Those times were well before the rebellion, when I was still at court! I was young and boorish and blind drunk much of the time! What little I can still recall of–!"

There was a horrible cracking sound and a sudden lurch. The passage rocked sideways, throwing them against the wall. Solas with his back against the mirror and Ellana on her stomach beside him.

Time had run out – they were falling.

Winded, terrified, and pinned by gravity, it took all the strength she had remaining for Ellana to turn her head and look at him. If this was to be how it ended, she wanted to go out with her eyes on his. But what she saw there, in those final seconds, was not the fear she expected to.

It was clarity.

He did not speak. He couldn't – without breath, and the steam and smoke filling in around them – instead he twisted a hand around the front of her shirt and yanked hard. It tore off in his hand, but not before he'd managed to haul her up on top of him. Nose to nose, heart to heart, lips to tongue.

And there, he slated his mouth against hers and kissed her.

Everything stopped.

All at once, they were without fear – without form or memory – and no purpose but this. Existing only for each other. They hung, weightless, in that space; a narrow universe in limbo between life and death, sustained within a single second, stretched beyond infinity. With this kiss, they were transformed: wrapped in ancient magic, tied together by Connection, and reforged.

They were made whole.

Made right.

Made one.

Everything happened.

The geas enthralled them. The eluvian flared to life at Solas' back. They fell through, transported into darkness. And what was left of the passage crashed down upon the floor of the cavern, over which it had been suspended for aeons. There, it sank into a well of molten rock, and was destroyed.

Somewhere else, a quiet room at the back of a sleeping ruin began to stir.