He immediately noticed 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. He barely noticed the now familiar city off in the distance. In this dream, Halamshiral still stood. But that didn't matter. She was crying, face hidden in her knees, red hair spilling over her back and arms.

He knew her then. In the waking world they have defeated Hakkon and returned to camp. Ellana didn't want to talk to anyone, just went straight to her tent, and he waited for a while before retiring as well and setting out to find her in the dreaming.

Solas sat down next to the child and embraced her silently, bringing her to his chest. She grabbed the front of his tunic as sobs shook her small body. They stayed like that for a while until the sobs grew weaker and farther between, and then some more until, as seamlessly as it was only possible in a dream, it was Ellana as he knew her, lying against his chest while he stroked her hair.

"So the grandfather you were waiting for, that was Ameridan?" he asked.

"Great-grandfather, actually. That was too much of a mouthful for me back then," she chuckled and then sighed. "I was born into a time of war. My parents tried to shield me from it as best they could, but I wasn't deaf. Children understand more than you'd think. And I thought, maybe if this great hero from the stories that used to lull me to sleep came back, he could make them all stop fighting. Make it alright again. Life showed me soon enough that no one was coming to save us. It was all down to us, not the gods, not some heroes of legends. It was down to us and we came up short. I thought that child was long gone, along with her silly beliefs, but seeing Ameridan brought it all back."

"I should've recognised you when I first saw you," he mused. Of course, she was a child back when he first saw her, but appearances didn't really matter. What blinded him was his belief that all elves of this time were mortal. He could still barely believe otherwise, but here she was, the living proof that he was, somehow, miraculously, wonderfully wrong.

"I did," she pulled away and smirked. "Though back then you had hair."

"Yes," he chuckled, running a hand over his bald scalp. "Or rather I didn't yet know that it was gone. And you have received your vallaslin since then."

"Still think they're silly?" she raised an eyebrow.

He raised a hand to her face and traced the line tattooed above her eyebrow with his thumb. She leaned into his hand, closing her eyes briefly. She was mesmerizing. How was he ever going to tell her the truth of what he did, what he was going to do?

"I was about to tell you what they represented, but you woke up," he recalled.

"You were going to tell a child that her people's self-image is centered around slave markings? Tsk. That's not nice."

"No, it is not," he agreed. And of course she already knew. But how? And if she knew that, has his identity ever been a secret to her? "But maybe I could have prevented you from getting them. If you like, I know a spell…"

"Don't you dare," she grabbed his wrist with a sudden force, pulling his hand away from her face. "How do you think it would look to the world if the Dalish Inquisitor suddenly showed up without her vallaslin? Would that benefit our people, do you think?"

Our people. When he wandered through their dreams, even more so when he woke up, he refused to see them as his people. He could barely see them as people at all. Then she came and changed everything. Could he still go on with his plans, knowing many of them will likely perish? Knowing there were people like her among them? Was there another way?

"You make an excellent point, as always," he conceded. "I simply wanted to make you aware of the possibility. But how did you come by this knowledge? The elves lost their history long before Halamshiral."

"I learned it in the Fade?" she tried innocently.

"I don't think so."

"Well, close enough," Ellana shrugged. "We found Vir Dirthara, or what fragments of it are still reachable. We are still working through it. I'm afraid the Archivist spirit is quite mad, but friendly enough."

That explained a lot. Him coming to the Dalish and trying to talk was one thing, but them finding the remains of the library that used to contain within itself all knowledge of the Elvhenan, even if only a tiny fragment of that knowledge survived, was something else entirely, something tangible they could believe. He already knew some elves of this time figured out how to use the Eluvians that still remained, it wasn't that much of a stretch that someone would stumble into the library.

"You keep telling me there are others like you. How is this possible? How many are there?"

"No. Your turn. I asked a question you deflected when we first met. Give me the truth."

That was the moment. From here, future diverged in two directions: one where he told her the truth, and the other where he came up with a clever lie or cut her off entirely. She was being the clever one, dangling more reveals in front of him in exchange for the same from him. She needn't have bothered. He wanted to tell her. But how do you even begin to tell a story that spanned millenia?

Perhaps you start simple.

"Yes," he answered the question that was eight hundred years old. "But I think you already knew the answer. Even as a child you had excellent instincts."

"You give me too much credit," Ellana shrugged. "For a god of lies you are a terrible liar, Solas. And… I think you were lonely. So lonely, you couldn't resist saying just a little too much in hopes that someone with a little bit of extra knowledge would figure it out. Or was it pride? Did you think no one would notice if you slipped something into the conversation here and there?"

"A bit of both, I suppose," he admitted, averting his gaze. "I slept for millennia before waking to a world where the Veil blocked most people's conscious connection to the Fade. A world of my own making."

"Vir Dirthara is full of echoes of the final moments of people who were caught in it when the Veil appeared. They were cursing Fen'Harel with their final breath. Why would you do it? You love the Fade."

"Because every alternative was worse," Solas said, watching the empty road. It did not provide much distraction. "If I did not stop the Evanuris, they would have destroyed the entire world."

"So you did instead?" There was, surprisingly, no blame in her voice. There didn't need to be, he blamed himself enough for both of them.

"I sought to free the elven people from would-be gods. The rebellion lasted for centuries, and the Evanuris were getting increasingly desperate, eventually turning to the horrific magic of the Blight. You must have seen several Blights throughout your life. Know that what exists in the world today is but a small fragment, while the rest is locked away with the Evanuris. I am certain you can deduce from that what it was like towards the end."

She was nodding slowly, filing away new information. He was almost disappointed by how calmly she was taking this. He's just admitted to being the great adversary of her people's mythology, the one who erected the Veil and in so doing destroyed the Elvhenan and all the countless marvels like Vir Dirthara, not to mention took away their people's immortality itself. Yet here she was, with him in the Fade where, even in this pathetically weakened state, he was at his most powerful. She was just sitting there, their shoulders almost touching. Not angry, not even afraid. If anything, she was sad.

"How long have you known?"

"I haven't really known until you've admitted it just now," she shrugged. "In the beginning I thought I'd found just another one of us. Wasn't all that unusual, it took us all centuries to find each other, and for all we know there are others still out there. It doesn't always go well, so we have to be careful about revealing ourselves. So I kept a close eye on you."

"And now you know."

"Now I do. And maybe, if we start being honest, we could finally start building real trust instead of dancing around each other."

"All those people you found dead in Vir Dirthara would think you a fool for even considering such a course," he warned bitterly. If there was one thing he knew, it was that he wasn't worthy of her trust. He never lied, not really, but he hid the truth and he manipulated everyone and everything towards his ends. He's done terrible things, and would go on to do more before the end. "What is the old Dalish curse? May the Dread Wolf take you?"

"That depends on what you're planning to do, I suppose. You didn't just happen to be nearby when Corypheus blew up the Conclave."

Speaking about the past was one thing. Revealing his future plans, even to her, wasn't something he could just do. At least not without finding out more first.

"No. But tell me how you managed to rediscover our people's immortality."

"I suppose that's fair," she shrugged. "But I didn't rediscover anything, we were all simply born this way. We've been trying to figure out what makes us different and how we can help others to achieve the same ever since. All of us are mages, all Dreamers, but not all Dreamers are us. All of us come from different bloodlines and different ages, but none are old enough to remember Arlathan or even the First Blight, in fact most of us are barely over a hundred years old. One thing we know for sure, immortality is not hereditary. Best we can tell, it has something to do with the gradual weakening of the Veil in the past thousand years."

There was old pain in her voice. Solas remembered Ameridan, who was clearly a powerful mage to be able to cast the spell that lasted for so long, but just as clearly already aged by the time he came to the Frostback Basin. Was she lamenting the family that has aged and died while she remained forever unchanged, unable to share her longevity with them? He thought back to the time he slept, only able to reach the surviving elves through dreams, seeing what has become of them and being powerless to fix it… what would it have been like to actually live it and see those you love turn to dust?

"That was the first thing we've tried, you see. We thought, in time, we might be able to restore the Elvhenan this way," she laughed entirely humorlessly. "It sounds horrible when I hear myself say it, even after all these years. It wasn't as callous as it sounds… Back then it felt right, finding someone who can finally understand you, finally having a family that will last. It felt right, until it didn't."

An icy knife dropped down Solas's throat and cut through his belly. She had a child. A mortal child she had to watch grow old and die, even as she herself defied the Veil through the sheer strength of her spirit. All because of what he'd done to the world.

"I'm sorry," was all he could manage to say. She smiled sadly in response.

"We failed her. She grew up with the expectation that she'll be forever young… and then she wasn't. She didn't want anything to do with us after that, and went to live with a Dalish clan. Even as she lay dying many decades later, surrounded by her new family, she didn't want to see me."

"You watched over her all those years?"

"Of course. What mother wouldn't? And she taught me a lot. She was stronger and better than me, she didn't let her mortality bring her down. She taught me that life wasn't less meaningful just because it was finite. Maybe even more so. This urgency to live, to experience, to leave the world better than you found it, not for yourself, but for those that will come after you… You look at the Dalish and see shadows of what were, trying to reenact distorted stories of the glorious past. I see community and love and above all the unyielding will to live. These people have lost everything many times over. Yet here they are, thriving in their own way, ever searching for meaning, doing what they can with almost nothing."

Ellana picked up a blade of grass and was studying it, as if slightly embarrassed by her high-flown speech. Solas watched. To him, she was more beautiful in that moment than he's ever seen her.

"She's changed everything," she continued softly after a while. "Children always do, I suppose. The way I looked at the world, what I thought my purpose was. We used to think we were special, somehow blessed by the gods with the lost immortality, magnitudes above the mortal elves. That it was on us to restore the glory of the Elvhenan. Instead, we set out to make their lives better. We had the benefit of time to figure out how. Our research eventually led us to Vir Dirthara. There isn't much to tell after that. We try to understand the past to avoid making the same mistakes, we take from it what we can use and share it with the Dalish - subtly, quietly, making it seem like they've discovered it themselves. We come to them, posing as city elves, and live among them, making sure they are safe and steering them towards new knowledge or trying to provide a fresh perspective on what they already have. We encourage them to learn from the past and to think for themselves. We make sure they don't know we exist, because we have no way to share our immortality with them and we don't want them to see us as some kind of new gods. It is slow, but we're changing the world little by little. By helping people help themselves."

"Was there one of you in the clan we met in the Dales?" he asked, suddenly curious.

"You've met him, in fact."

"Loranil?"

"Yes," she chuckled. "He quite enjoys the part where he gets to play the young impressionable elf. I'm not very good at it. Of course, that put him at a disadvantage when he needed to persuade the Keeper not to travel to the Dales, so he had to ask for my help to protect them."

"And then, after a couple of decades, I suppose you stage a hunting accident where a body cannot be recovered, and you go back to Vir Dirthara, erase your vallaslin and then infiltrate another clan where no one will recognise you?"

"Just so," she touched her forehead. "The process of getting the new ones is hardly pleasant, but they are not what they used to be. The Dalish made them their own, they changed the meaning. In some clans you can even see new designs where you would hardly recognise the Evanuris symbolism at all. With time, I expect they will evolve away from it entirely. And with time, they will not need to believe in gods anymore, and they will finally be free and capable of taking care of themselves. It will not happen overnight with some grand feat by a fabled hero. It will just be them growing up and taking responsibility for themselves."

"What about city elves? Tevinter slaves?"

"Our influence there is quite limited, unfortunately. Any significant improvements in the lives of city elves are too likely to draw attention from the humans and make things even worse for them than before. We try to encourage them to join the Dalish, but that life is not for everyone," she said, flicking away the blade of grass she was playing with. "Understandable. As for Tevinter… That is an even bigger issue, but both require systemic change and patience. For the South, that change may accumulate as a result of my influence as Inquisitor. If I can extend that influence on the new leadership of the Chantry, that could have lasting consequences. For the North, our best bet right now is Dorian."

"Is that why you've been spending so much time with him?"

"I genuinely enjoy spending time with him. I think he's delightful," she raised her eyebrows. "Same goes for you."

"I'm delightful?" he repeated sceptically. Ellana snorted.

"Not the word I would've used. What I meant is I have enjoyed spending time with you, even if my motives for doing so have not been entirely… transparent."

"Have enjoyed," he echoed again, conscious of her very specific choice of words.

"Well… You haven't told me what your plans are yet. Now that you've admitted to being Fen'Harel, this could go several different ways. You could even kill me here in the Fade, I suppose, though probably not before Corypheus is dealt with."

She wasn't scared of him. He had wondered about that since the beginning of this conversation. Even if she really thought he'd do that to her, her belief in the potential of the elven people, in the motives and plans of her group was strong enough to make her own life inconsequential. It was unbearable.

He took her hand in both of his.

"I would never hurt you," he promised quietly, looking into her sad green eyes.

"I believe that you have no wish to," she squeezed his hand in response. "But no plan that begins with letting an ancient blighted magister take your ancient power source is a good plan."

"He was supposed to die in the blast," Solas shook his head. That miscalculation was still haunting him. No, not miscalculation, mistake. He saw no other way to help the People, and so he did it. Like he did with the Veil. Like he did so many times before during that endless, bitter war. That was the man he had become. He was looking at this bright, hopeful spirit before him. She has lived in the broken world of his creation for hundreds of years, and she still believed there was a better way. Did he dare hope?

"Let's assume he does, the long way around. What then?"

"Then I would take the Orb and absorb the power within, restoring myself. I would then be able to take the Anchor from you and use it to tear down the Veil," he admitted almost mechanically, his thoughts spinning. "As this world burned in the raw chaos, I would have restored the world of my time."

"That would be… catastrophic," she frowned. "Not only for the waking world as it is today. The spirits have also adapted to the existence of the Veil, many of them will be harmed and twisted by the sudden exposure. Not to mention the Evanuris and the Blight you locked away. Why do it that way?"

"Because, a long time ago, I broke this world. It falls to me to fix it," he said stubbornly, though he didn't feel as certain as he sounded. Ellana gave him a doubtful look.

"There's more, isn't there?" she sighed. "It's alright, you don't have to tell me everything. It just… doesn't feel like you. There is someone wise and reflecting and kind, and then there's this hardened revolutionary who's all pride and guilt and terrible choices. You can't be both. Sooner or later you'll have to let one of them go, and I'd hate it to be the wrong one."

"You believe it's a choice."

"Everything is a choice. You can choose to follow this course, and who knows, maybe you even succeed in everything you set out to do. But if you fail, the world will be ruined for the final time, there will be no do-over. Or," she put her free hand over his, "you come with me, meet my people. Work with us to find a better way. The Veil has been weakening for hundreds of years. Together we could research a way to bring it down slowly, to prepare both worlds to reunite, to contain the Evanuris when the time comes. No great catastrophe, no terrible casualties. Just nature, finally allowed to take its course."

"What if there is no other way?"

"Then we talk about it again when we know for sure. For now all I ask is that you don't run off with the Orb once we defeat Corypheus. You go with me to meet my people. Can you promise me that?"

The way she was looking at him… Imploring, waiting, hoping he was the man she believed he was. What she was offering him was a future where none had existed before. He did not expect to survive his plan. In fact, he did not wish to. He intended it as a final act of atonement - for all the terrible things he had done, all the friends he'd betrayed in the name of… what? He no longer really knew after all these years. In time, every new sacrifice became more and more about not making all the sacrifices before it meaningless than it was about the original purpose. He just couldn't stop. Unless he took the way out that she offered.

"Will you believe the promise of the Dread Wolf?" he asked.

"No. But I will believe yours."

He felt something inside him breaking. Like a tight string snapping under tension.

"I promise," he whispered, sealing it with a kiss of a man lost in a desert who had finally found water.