It took him a while to notice the child sitting in the grass on the side of a hill with a view of the road he knew to be called the Imperial Highway. The first thing that drew his attention instead, that always drew his attention was the now familiar city off in the distance. Halamshiral still stood, at least in this dream.
For centuries he wandered through the dreams of his people, unnoticed by all save for an occasional Dreamer, condemned to watch the ones he tried to save and instead destroyed by his own hand. If only he could gather enough strength to wake up, perhaps he could… do what? Would he share their fate, withering away in mere decades until nothing was left of him but echoes in the Fade? Would that be a fitting punishment for his hubris? He knew in his heart that it would not. He deserved nothing less than this eternity of watching the embers that remained of his people fade away, powerless to interfere, to undo his mistakes.
Halamshiral was the first glimmer of hope for them after a long, dark night. For nearly three centuries now he watched his people try to rebuild themselves in this new land. Former slaves all, still frail, still so very mortal, clinging to a few remembered words of a now dead language, a few songs that mothers sang through the dark times to lull their babies to sleep. That was the foundation on which they strived to restore the Elvhenan, instead of the vast libraries filled with the knowledge of millenia past that should've been their inheritance. His fault, again. He couldn't really blame them.
He tried to approach the few Dreamers he encountered to offer the only thing he still had to offer - his knowledge - but they fled in terror. He couldn't blame them for that either.
And then they started again with the cursed vallaslin. It felt like with that final insult all his work, all those centuries of war, all the friends dead were rendered meaningless. They were again happy to declare themselves slaves of the Evanuris - even if their masters had long been locked away by the wicked Fen'Harel.
"Are you the Dread Wolf?" a very serious if somewhat squeaky voice inquired, tearing him from his dark thoughts. That was when he remembered this wasn't his dream.
She was looking at him with that extremely serious, singularly focused and blissfully unafraid expression that only a child could muster. Too young to be able to recognize and control her dreams, but at the same time too aware to be anything other than a Dreamer. It was bleakly depressing how few of his people could reach through the Veil with enough strength. Perhaps there were more in the beginning, when his power had been so depleted that he fell into complete blackness, not even dreaming for centuries, but they would've been killed first - some by the conquering humans that did not need slaves with exceptional magical abilities, others perhaps by the very existence of the Veil.
He looked down briefly. He appeared as he strived to remember himself, though perhaps not what he truly was after all this time, - a wiseman, not a warrior, nor a god. Just one of the People, clad in simple robes, not the elaborate battle armor and furs that felt so alien in the beginning and became second skin towards the end. His long hair was gently swaying in the wind, no staff slung across his back to hinder it. No weapons, no threat. Yet the adult Dreamers still recognised him, perhaps sensing in his spirit what he tried to hide in his appearance. Or perhaps they simply took him for a demon. But this child was looking at him with curiosity, not fear.
"What makes you think so?" he ventured.
"My mother says if I keep running off into the hills, the Dread Wolf will eat me," she informed him. "But you don't look like the Dread Wolf. He has six red eyes and is really big and eats naughty children. You just look like my uncle."
He rolled his eyes. Of course, of all the ways to be remembered…
"My name is Solas," he offered. "And I don't eat children."
"Are you coming from the Mountains? Have you seen my grandad? He really should be back by now," a wave of hope washed over him, coming from the child. It was always like this in the Fade, emotions running unchecked, powerful, transmitted freely by the very fabric of the dream. Was it the first time since he fell into this endless slumber that anyone apart from some old spirit friends met him with anything other than fear?
No, I haven't met your grandfather, he wanted to answer. Judging by how the waking world treats your people, odds are he is never coming home. Perhaps you already know that he is gone and you shelter from the truth in this dream. But the fierce hope of a child was not something he could bear to extinguish. Not when he was already carrying the guilt of extinguishing the hope of his entire people.
"What is your grandad like?" he asked instead.
"He's very tall," the child said thoughtfully. "And he's very important. Everyone's been arguing with everyone since he went away. So I come here to wait for him."
Even in your dreams. He sighed and sat down next to the child.
"He's a very powerful mage, you know," she gave him a look she probably gave all the adults who doubted that her grandfather, wherever and whoever he was, would ever come back. "He can take on a dragon, easy."
"Then I'm sure he's just coming back very slowly because the dragon's hoard is big and heavy," Solas suggested, opening his hands.
"Where's your vallaslin?" she suddenly asked, switching between the worry for her grandfather and curiosity.
"I never had it," he shrugged.
"Everyone has them," the child informed him confidently.
"You don't."
"Because I'm too small, silly! You can't have vallaslin until you're a grownup!"
He snorted despite his best efforts. How many thousands of years has it been since anyone has called him silly? Has anyone ever? He could no longer remember.
"Well maybe I think the vallaslin are silly," he said and grinned at her frown.
"The vallaslin show everyone that you're elven," she reasoned.
"Because your ears don't?"
"And they honor our gods," she reddened, a child growing angry that an adult wasn't taking her seriously.
"Do you believe in the elven gods?"
Suddenly her shoulders drooped and she looked away.
"My brother says if they even existed, they're long gone now, so it doesn't matter really. They're always arguing about that with mother. He believes in the Maker, like shemlen. He still has vallaslin, though," she shrugged. "And you don't."
Solas sighed and turned his eyes to the city. The elves of this time clung to whatever scraps they could remember, no matter how distorted, to distinguish themselves from humans. He felt that would be their undoing, for the humans would find it too easy to make an enemy of those too different from them. And this new idea of an omniscient Maker that was gaining more and more followers - often at the tip of a sword - was not going to help. He'd seen too closely what people are willing to do to those who, in their minds, followed the wrong god. But what could they do? They were a small, powerless people, barely hanging on to a sliver of land, surrounded by those who saw them as dangerously different - his own actions made sure of that. Would it be better if they mingled with humans, peacefully disappearing into them in a few hundred years?
Those thoughts were, perhaps, better left for another time. Right now he finally had someone at least willing to listen. Perhaps through this child he could speak to them, give them the knowledge they needed to survive, to be… them.
"What if I told you they were real, but they were not gods?" he asked, turning back to the child.
She was gone. Perhaps shaken awake by something. Perhaps it was simply morning in the waking world. The dream dissolved around him into fragments, and the fragments - into peaceful nothingness.
He tried to find her again as time went by, but she never came back to that grassy hillside overlooking the road. Her dreams turned into nightmares filled with fire and death, and she could no longer hear him over the screams of the dying.
If she survived at all, the child's spirit was so changed by the fall of Halamshiral, that he could no longer recognise her.