She couldn't begin. Questions tumbled against each other in her mind and rendered her speechless.
"I can see you're confused, Evelyn. Quite natural, I assure you, and my manners have been regrettable." A chair materialized several feet away. "Please, sit. My proposal will take some time, and kneeling on stone is very uncomfortable."
She didn't move. He shrugged and sat. "Where is this?" she asked.
"A place in the Fade, as you call it, that no mortal has ever been to. In fact, you're only the third, besides myself, to set foot in it! Or fourth, depending on how you look at it. But there I go again being cryptic. Old habits, I'm afraid. It doesn't do for gods to just say things."
"So you really are a god?"
Solas stirred next to her and growled. "Self-titled." She turned back to him immediately. He looked weak, but his eyes were clearer than she'd feared.
The tall elf steepled his fingers. "When you're powerful enough, it seems to be the only word that fits. Regardless, I ruled Arlathon, have no doubt about that. But now I'm here, in a place made my prison by those who feared my power and wished to overthrow me." He snapped his fingers when Solas protested. "Hush, Fen'Harel. Wait your turn."
Evelyn shook her head. "Why do you keep calling him that? Fen'Harel is a wolf god, an evil spirit, right?"
Elgar'nan beamed at her, like a teacher at a clever student. "Exactly! And he sits before us, though in vastly different form I must say. The bare face doesn't suit you at all, harellan." He leaned forward, suddenly confidential. "In fact, he's the reason we're all here right now. Betrayal runs through his every line. Ask him whose orb he used to try to enter the Fade. Ask him who gave it to the darkspawn to tear open the sky. Ask him who put the events in motion that gave you the scar that changed your life."
She stared at Solas, who closed his eyes. Grief lined his face, brought stark by the paleness in his cheeks. "No more lies, deceiver?" Elgar'nan asked. "Or perhaps even you heed the call of justice, eventually."
He sighed and spoke quietly. "I'm no god, but yes, I am the wolf. I fought for freedom for my brothers and sisters, freedom from their self-styled gods. I stole the foci from the so-called father, long ago. I wanted to hide it and weaken him. My brothers wanted a weapon. Things happened that I couldn't control. I came back to try to make things right. Corypheus was my choice. He was a poor one. The anchor you bear is my doing." He opened his eyes at last, and she recoiled from the wolf in them, no longer hiding. "You didn't need to know this, ma falon! I told you to leave me. Why could you not do as I asked, just one time?"
Applause rang out. "So prettily he tells it, doesn't he? Lies always spill so nicely from his lips. No mention of the thousands of cuts he's put on the lives of the Elvhen. And of course he blames you, as if discovering treachery is worse than perpetrating it."
Evelyn stood and backed away. She hit the chair behind her and sat with a thud. She tried to find anger, but all she felt was exhaustion. "This was you all along? So much death. Why? The help you gave us, finding Skyhold, showing me how to use the anchor, trying to convince me to wisdom…" And then the anger came, hot and strong. "You've been lying to me since we met, haven't you?"
"Yes," he said simply. She snorted.
"Even more than you know, Evelyn. He's kept secrets that made your mind more vulnerable than you guessed," the god said. "You don't mind that I call you by your name, do you? We've spent so much time together."
She smacked the arms of her chair. "Yes. Why were you speaking to me? How could you even do that? I thought -" I thought I was going mad.
He tipped his head at her anchor. "The foci that gave you that mark was mine. It carried a large part of my power, and some of my essence. I could connect to it, even from this prison. I've grown stronger over the long centuries. While the orb was still whole, you were difficult to find, like a drop of colored water in an ocean. Once it was destroyed, you stood out in a desert. I knew you were my last chance of making things right. I needed you to come to me. I needed you to be unburdened by the world. You're a worthy vassal, Evelyn. Your mind is sharp and true."
Solas growled again, and the sound was more feral than ever. "Leave her be."
She ignored him. "If this is your prison, why did you smash the Eluvian? Wasn't it your door out?"
"Another good question. No, that door was useless to me. Mythal and Fen'Harel created it to allow only two elves to pass through it, themselves. They created a very clever key as well, a two part key that they thought unbreakable, even if an elf managed to bypass their magic. You've proven them wrong yet again, though they think themselves so wise."
"Two parts? I only had one, the hymn."
"Yes, the hymn known only to the Wolves, unknowable by any other. And the second part, Mythal's spirit herself. Without both, the lock would never turn."
She looked at herself, horrified. "Mythal really is possessing me? She's wearing me, like a piece of armor?"
Elgar'nan laughed gently. "No, nothing that simple. My foci had one other effect, one that Fen'Harel wants you to know even less than his own complicity in your burden. When he stole it, he twisted a part of himself inside, to keep its location hidden from me. That piece lived on, and he fed it before giving it to the darkspawn pretender. When it branded your hand, he joined with you, irrevocably. He senses you, as I do."
There were no words for the revulsion that filled her. Solas winced, and she was glad. Good. Feel my disgust, she thought at him. You've stolen my privacy without a word.
"It's not that way," he said tiredly. "Only if you're feeling strong emotion, or thinking about me specifically, do thoughts come. I tried to block it as best I could, unless I needed to find you. It's how I knew you lived after Haven. It helped me keep you safe."
"Don't justify it," she snapped. "It was a violation." She turned back to the god. "But it doesn't explain Mythal."
"Who do you think stole my wife and the soul she carried? She speaks to you through him."
"It was given willingly. To give me strength to help the Elvhen," Solas said. "To stop enslavers like you from ruining us for all time."
"I had no slaves. They, too, gave themselves willingly to me."
"Because you cowed them with power, enchanted them into a worshipfulness they should never have felt."
Elgar'nan raised his eyebrow, and Solas looked away. The god smiled. "Yes, so you told your brothers. After all, a wolf must have his pack. You betrayed your gods, raised bloody rebellion throughout Arlathan. You even persuaded Mythal to cover you in her protections to aid your cause. For good, you said. For revenge. There was no justice in what you did, little wolf. Your brothers bit and tore through our nation and left us weak. Open to invasion. And when I was needed, you locked me away and left your people to die. You locked your brothers away and tried to rule in our place. And now where are the Elvhen?" He rose up, cold anger replacing the genial god. "You will face justice for what you've done to me and mine, harellan. I swear it in my name."
"You did that to your own people? For power?" She stared at him in disbelief.
He pulled at his bonds, scraping them across his arms. "No! Never. To free them. The so-called gods had perverted us, turned us into slaves for their own pleasure. They branded them with marks to show ownership, stole their bodies from them to live eternal lives. They called themselves Creators, but they were base men and women like the rest of us. It wasn't right to worship our own kind." His eyes begged her to understand. "But my brothers, they wanted to destroy what was and then remake society, set themselves in place of those we wanted to overthrow. It would have been just another kind of oppression. I argued with them. I tried. But they wouldn't listen. So with Mythal I had to… lock them away. I had no choice!"
"The words of tyrants everywhere. How many men have grabbed power claiming there was no other path? And yet you sought to free them again, using the darkspawn, to bring them back into the world and elevate yourself." Solas hung his head, silent. Elgar'nan appraised her. "You see what he is."
She did. She felt so very small and alone.
"I still don't know what good I am to you. The Eluvian is broken. We're all trapped here."
"Not true! You have the remnants of my foci within you, the one that would open prison walls. Fen'Harel lacked the strength to use it, but I can, with your help. He can remain here, as a criminal, with Mythal at his side, and we'll return to the world. I have seen the injustices it holds, for both our people. The humans in the Imperium threaten us both. We can set that to rights. The world can have its peace. You can have your peace. Your hand won't trouble you anymore with me there to control it. Your life will return."
Elgar'nan's voice came tantalizingly across the room. "Aren't you tired of who you've had to become? No one caring about you, except what you can give them? Content to let you make their choices, until they disagree? I watched the things you chose not to see about them. They hold you at arm's length while you fight and claw to invite them into your heart. They've taken so much from you, Evelyn. They've even taken your name, the better to twist you into what they need." She heard whispered voices dance across the room, the voices of her friends.
"Your Worship." "Boss." "Herald." "My lady." "My dear." "Ma falon." "Your Grace." "She." Varric, Bull, Cole, Leliana, everyone she loved with the same names that took her away, made her less herself and more their need. "Inquisitor. Inquisitor. Inquisitor." She thought she'd been losing herself from the inside out, succumbing to madness, but it was their expectations that drove her away, deeper and deeper until she was everything to everyone but nothing to herself.
Her anger rose as she looked for a woman named Evelyn Trevelyan and could no longer find her. Where was the girl who'd drawn faces in Chantry books and pulled her sister's hair? Where was the woman who'd done nothing more with her evenings than read a book and dream? When had she allowed her happiness to drain away? Who'd buried her underneath this person of stone? Her supposed friends, the men and women who wanted nothing they couldn't control or understand. Compliance and perfection, no matter the cost.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "You're wrong. Cullen. He never loses track of who I am. He sees me clearly." His voice cut through the rest, speaking her name as he leaned on his office door. Whispering it as she slept.
Elgar'nan tutted. "Yes, Cullen, your brave warrior. He stands by you, like the oldest story. But you repay him with lies and secrecy, don't you? How many times have you shaded yourself with him, to keep him safe? For the good of the cause? How much of the true Evelyn does he even know? He knows you as a leader. You know that who he loves isn't all you are."
She knew.
"Plus it's been long, so long, since you've seen him. Shall I show you him now? His heart has grown weak, and he searches for something to make it strong again."
Her advisors stand at the War Table. Leliana finishes her report and leaves the room while Cullen and Josephine gather their papers. He looks so tired and sad, and Evelyn wants to reach out to him and smooth away the lines on his brow. As she thinks it, Josephine does, touching his face with her hands. He looks at her, searchingly, then pulls her to him in a kiss that rocks her back into the table. She grabs him to steady herself, and he groans and presses himself against her. His hands rub slow, easy circles on her back as he releases her lips to trail kisses to her neck. Josephine asks in breathless tones, What about the Inquisitor? Cullen snarls and moves his attentions to her ear. I don't want to talk about her, he whispers. She's not here. You are.
Evelyn cried out and the image vanished. She glared at her hands through blurry tears. The anchor sparked as fury coursed through her. The self that was Evelyn Trevelyan grew again in her, dark and terrible, and she wanted to rip and tear the world apart. How dare it take this last thing from her? She'd given it everything else it wanted.
Solas called to her desperately. "It wasn't real. He took it from your mind, from your own fears. If you haven't seen it with your own eyes, it's not real. He has no power to see the world except through you."
"You would know, wouldn't you, since you gave him that power. Used that power. How did you manipulate me with it? How much of me was given by you? What parts of this life, my life, weren't supposed to be real?" she asked. She reveled in the anguish on his face.
"Please, ma falon, I didn't -"
"Don't call me that!" she screamed. She flexed her hands, fighting the urge to rise and slap him. "You did all of this! Those people who died, people I knew, people I never met, for your choices. For what? To raise a darkspawn god. To regain your own power, rule over an elven kingdom. Smash my kind into dust, past all memory of our existence."
His eyes snapped to hers, furious. "And what are humans to me? Enslavers. Destroyers. They take down weak, frail prey and call themselves glorious in the hunt. My people had a chance for real freedom until your kind came along. I had almost convinced them to peace. I was so close. Then came the humans. It all collapsed, and I slept in my peoples' nightmares for centuries, until they forgot who I am and called me the nightmare."
"You made them weak, Fen'Harel. You locked us away, their strength, and pretended you could replace it with your own. You were the start of nightmares," Elgar'nan said.
Uncertainty rippled across his face, and his anger drained. She fought to hold on to her rage, to hate this man who would be a god. The sadness in his eyes cut at her and bled it away.
"I woke to find Andraste waging holy war against the enslavers. I saw another chance and convinced the Elvhen to ally with her, to fight for their freedom. They died around me by the thousands but in the end they won it. I slept again, looking for kind dreams. But rather than give them back their home, she banished them to a corner of the world to rebuild a new society, rather than reclaim the true one. I watched them change into something sordid, taking the depraved parts of their history and making them holy again, worshipping the very things that kept them in chains. They called me traitor for trying to save them." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Perhaps I am."
Tears spilled onto her cheeks. "You tried to do right," she sighed. "You just did it so wrongly." She rubbed the tears away and saw green sparks. "What changed? There was no right in what you've done to the world now."
Dark misery on his face. "I was so angry. I woke into this body, and the world was ugly. The elves were a mockery of themselves. Even the Fade, the gentle place, was being sundered by power and arrogance and desire. My spirit friends, the oldest ones, were being corrupted and changed or chained to human wills. There was nothing familiar left for me, nothing to love, only cold emptiness. I needed my pack back. I needed my brothers, even if they hated me. I had the orb, but no power to open the distant doors in the Fade where they were trapped. Corypheus was the only one who would try the impossible, rip into the void to step inside, so I used him to try to turn the key. He betrayed me, stole the orb and left me to die."
"The betrayer betrayed," Elgar'nan said. "Ironic. And yet when you found Evelyn, you told her nothing of your actions. You tried to use her to fix your own errors. Always seeing people as tools, tossing them aside and picking them up as you choose without regard to anything but your own needs. At least what I offer I offer her with full disclosure."
Solas hissed. "You offer nothing but dishonesty. The cost you demand for yourself is always higher than you say. You won't stop at the Imperium, or whatever you convince her is justice. You'll take the world as payment. I won't allow her to give it to you."
She bristled. "You're not my keeper, wolf. You don't allow me to do anything."
He captured her eyes with his. "You're the only worthy human I've ever met. You understand the world and walk respectfully inside it even with the great power you wield. You know when power is enough and can leave a lure behind. You've done more good in your quick life than I've done in my thousands of years, by being right instead of only wanting it. The times you disappoint are when you think as I do instead of as yourself. You saved the world once when you touched the orb and robbed it of its completeness, but you save it still by being the spirit that you are. If you saw your own power, this vain pretender would have none over you. I'll die for that, if I must."
The last with such terrible intensity she looked away.
Elgar'nan laughed. "And so we come to it, the great tragedy. Fen'Harel, harellan, traitor and betrayer, who betrays those he loves with ruthless predictability. His masters locked away, his brothers abandoned, even the sweet Mythal left to scrape an existence inside a human soul. He wouldn't accept his dearest friend choosing a new body from among her people, though he himself does so at every turn."
"This body was given to me willingly. I didn't steal it with a liar's brand."
"And yet you gave yourself willingly to me once, did you not?" He ran a finger down Solas's cheek, and he flushed. "The first time you broke love's trust, but not the last. And now you love after you've already broken it. Does it hurt more or less, I wonder?" He gazed speculatively at Evelyn.
She frowned. "He doesn't love me. Not that way."
"Doesn't he, Evelyn? How interesting."
His mouth presses against hers eagerly, and she responds with a hunger that drives him mad. His hands explore her body, and he marvels at the difference between human and elf. He shivers and arches his back when she runs her finger over his ear, tracing up to the point and then back. She smiles wickedly, and he's lost. His mouth is on her again, more urgently. He hears her whimper beneath him. Solas, she breathes, and he can think of nothing but her.
The vision stopped, and the silence was complete. The phantom hands on her left more slowly, and the enormity of the invasion hit her. Had he lived in her with Cullen? Had he seen into her dreams? She saw Cullen and Josephine in her mind's eye, mixed with her own fading feelings of pleasure, and wondered if anything could be clean again. Solas refused to look at her face. "You had no right to do that," he said. His voice was small and ashamed.
"I had every right. You're my slave, no matter how bare you become. You gave yourself to me in face and body. You came to me and asked for my marks and begged for my bed until you decided to break your oaths and lead a bloody rebellion to escape me. Now, you're in this prison and your life is mine once more. I tire of trying to convince you, Lady, so here's my new bargain. Either you open this place and we shape the world into a better one, or I continue to hurt both of you until you open it and I leave alone." He smiled. "Honestly, I'm not sure which one I would like more."