Chapter Text
When she woke later, she didn’t tell anyone what she dreamt in the Fade. Not Dorian, not Cole.
She had stood in a private room of the Vir Dirthara, staring into an eluvian that had stood glowing and trapped in the Fade. She saw a glowing pattern in green, crackling and growing across her upper arm. It flashed and seared, forcing her onto a knee again with an incredible pain, unmatched by any she had ever felt, even during the Exalted Council.
'The People kneel too easily,' she snarled, the memory of Mythal's words striking up the pride in her heart to stand, but the pain incapacitated her. All she could do was watch her body shake. The power of Fen’Harel’s mark crawled over her chest. It expanded, inching its way across slowly, taking its time as though she had forever.
She knew she did not.
She stared into the floating eluvian before her. Her simple linen nightgown had gained an unhealthy, unnerving lustre of shifting light. She turned her gaze at the implacable stare of the ancient wolf statue guarding the mirror. She gritted her teeth against the shriek of pain that tore across her left side, even as blue lightning ripped across the bronze mosaics on the walls all around her.
“The mark will eventually kill you. Drawing you here gave me the chance to save you…at least for now.”
Did he not save her, before he dissolved her arm from below her elbow? Her heartbeat was becoming erratic. She had failed again to remember what it was like to love without pain. To feel curiosity without fear. To think of the Fade, the Veil, and spirits with open-mindedness, and not the crushing pressure that she was running out of time. On her knee, head bowed but pride undimmed, she took her frustration, her suffering, and her love for a Dread Wolf, and curled her remaining hand into a fist. She raised it above her and opened it like she did when she had an anchor in another palm, not so long ago.
She envisaged a conduit.
She thought of tunnels and keys. Of bridges and pathways.
She closed her eyes and thought of Compassion, a spirit who became more than a spirit. Compassion, who crossed over the Veil to become a boy, a companion, and a friend. Cole, who become Maryden’s lover. She thought about how Cole said someone took a body because someone important had asked. Had that been Solas? And when she asked what he saw when he looked at her, he had said something about birds against the sun, and being too bright.
'But what the hell does that mean?' she thought for the thousandth time, but she lifted her head to watch her reflection in the eluvian.
‘Well, I certainly am bright now,’ she thought bitterly.
Instinctually, in the way of dreams, she looked at the mirror and began to pull. The tendrils of the Dread Wolf’s power fought her. Blood that was not blood, a song or a trace of time... whatever Cole meant, the power in her was not meant to be her power. She hitched a breath and thought of time and of flipping hourglasses. How she wanted more time. More stories of his past, more time to challenge him about the future, just more time! The struggle for control over the power began to overwhelm her, trickling back over her skin to reclaim what little she had gained, and her hand began to waver above her. As she felt herself near to screaming, tears streaming, she saw the eluvian begin to shimmer.
‘It’s the Fade,’ she thought to herself. ‘Tricks and deception.’
The hand that reached out from the eluvian could be anyone’s. Belong to any thing’s. The fingers were long and beautiful, but that too meant nothing. The wrist was strong and lithe, and the smudges on the fingertips pointed to hours with charcoal and ink, but that could have meant anything. She didn’t want to hope.
'Spirits of Hope are much too rare,' she thought.
And when was the last time she felt any real hope? The fingertips were light upon her palm, barely touching, but the magic that flowed from them was anything but unfamiliar. It was blessedly cooling, like the softest spring breeze in the safety of the thicket of a forest outside Wycombe. A hidden safe place, where the Lavellan clan would take the youngest of the halla herd with their mothers to graze after a hard winter. Her brow and scalp, covered in thick sweat, was soothed. She wanted to weep with the remembrance of this gentle, sweet power. His mana flowed and cooled her tortured body. He touched his palm to hers so softly, and she called his name, the pathetic relief palatable in her body. Then she remembered her position, and struggled to stand.
She would not kneel to him. Not ever.
The bright green glow of his power continued to siphon away the pain. The effect felt like a large, soft feather, gently sweeping and curling across her chest. She breathed through the unexpected sensuality and sweetness, and involuntarily, felt her nipples harden. She remembered other times, other places. She stared at the eluvian, wishing she could see the rest of him. Wondered if he could see her. Certain that he must, if he could find her hand so easily. She sighed as the pain continued to recede and the pleasure increased, the jangled nerves confused and unwinding. She wanted so badly to fall over with relief, but she clenched her buttocks and thighs hard, locking her legs in place.
No, she would never be brought low to this man again. They were two warriors - two rulers – in a kingdom locked in a deadly struggle. Two former lovers caught in a tangle of desire. As the last of the green glow of his magic flickered out, only the eluvian illuminated her skin. Without warning, she grabbed at the long-fingered hand.
“Wait.”
The Fade reflected more than she could know. Too much flickered around her. Thoughts and images cascaded, some wanton, others battle tactics. But on the other side of the mirror, he was captivated by her simple nightgown, so unlike the candlesilk and griffon-feather confections the pleasure slaves of the Evanuris would employ. Lavellan's plain, unbleached cotton was a thousand times more effective. He remembered the times when he pleasured her out of it, just to see how ruthlessly he could cage her, plunging his fingers, his lips, his tongue into her body, until she was undone and unable to speak more than her love for him in a mindless, almost indelible murmur. Surely, she could not know. It could only be a nightgown to her. A mere construction in the Fade. He narrowed his eyes on the other side of the mirror, assessing her closely.
It could be a ploy, but the drop of her eyes to his hand and the uncontrolled rage of the power that called him here said otherwise. His power had continued to pull him to her. He had thought dissolving her arm would end this tie binding them, literally cutting off the liability. None in his organisation could know that he could be a puppet in the Fade to her, a marionette to her call when the remnant of his anchor built to unacceptable levels in her spirit. He wanted to hate her for it, except she appeared to have no understanding of the power she still held. This unexpected vessel, still cracking at the seams – perhaps she had no choice but to cry out for him before she exploded.
He had asked his agents to report if there were physical manifestations in her daily life, but the difficulty in infiltrating her inner circle had been considerable. And so, like any other starved, mangy wolf, prowling around the edges of the winter forest, he had waited for his prey. When she fell with his name on her lips, trapped at the edge of his eluvian network, it was all too easy to come at her call.
He remembered trespassing into her bed, and the lines he drew in his mind, in her bed, and on her body. Lines he swore he would not cross. When she said his name in the dark, it felt more like a hymn of recognition, tumbled and smeared into the freckles of his skin. His name was the space between the stars, and when she told him this, he filled her mouth with his tongue, trying to stop her from speaking further, but her song continued. It pulsed in the magic in her hand, binding them.
Solas, Solas, Solas, she wept into his neck, biting and sucking at the junction to his shoulder, her hips bucking helplessly against him. She moved to draw him in even as he weakly shied away, but she had given him all she had to give. Her whole heart, beating bloody and true. He heard her song wrap around the crude bones that encompassed his spirit. The cracks and breaks, long since weakened and denied, were tempted to heal.
Whimpers escaped his lips.
She understood the symphony of need she heard, of the desire to belong and to be found, to be forgiven and to be loved. She instinctively held all that was contained within the sound that treacherously escaped from beneath the mask that he wore. This diminished little elf girl from the Free Marches had moved between the shadows for so long, never belonging, never finding peace, but in him, she had found her kindred spirit. She had moved to hold him closer, to bring him into her at last, her body and her eyes hot with need.
His eyes had flashed in warning. She had seen too much. Heard too much. The song had resonated, a crescendo that threatened to pull him under, pull him inside out.
Was he a spirit, or an Elvhen?
Was he Solas of the Elvhen, or Solas of the Inquisition?
He felt split down the middle, unable to hold against the tide of love for her and his mission.
He was lost as she lifted her hips against his aching, weeping cock, and---
It would not do.
He could not accept it. Once again, he decided to give in to his predator instincts and devour what he could not accept. It was better for him - better for them both - to hide within the wolf and let it keep them safe. He flipped her over. He punished her with pleasure and overcame her initial resistance that she could do nothing but accept his domination. She submitted, taking all that he had left to give to her until she nearly blacked out with their hedonism. As he wiped out his mana, he cooled her brow and brought her back to him. She sighed in contented bliss as he gently lapped at her sore cunt, his tongue another welcome, blissful sensation and he unconsciously lengthened and flattened it out, letting the wolf out to play in the darkness. He lifted her legs up and outwards, stretching her groin like a physic, drinking in the almost jelly-like slippery wetness from its source.
"Your cunt overflows with the sweetest wine," he crooned in Elvhen, then stuffed his tongue further inside, seeking the very mouth of her womb, the fount of her spring. He licked, undone by the flavour.
"Ripe and ready to eat, sweet Elvhen maid."
She was not fluent enough to understand, but she understood his pleasure as his jaws opened; he reached up with a long arm and covered her eyes. She fastened her mouth onto the heel of his hand and sucked, her eyes closed in rolling pleasure. Gently, so very carefully, he fastened his teeth onto the front of his prey’s quivering mound. He had not done this in so, so long. She whimpered, but if the strangeness affected her, she was too far gone with pleasure to care. His other hand was wrapped around his leaking cock. He ignored the sac that wanted to swell into a huge knot. It would have no place that night. He let his teeth very gently worry at her swollen knot of nerves. When his Inquisitor jerked slightly, he grinned a very wolfish slash of teeth, and did not let up his lapping or his smooth, careful troubling at her oversensitive skin. It finally registered to Lavellan that the anatomy his mouth was somehow…off.
"How...is that your teeth?" she asked.
He traced her mouth tenderly with slippery fingers, and she sucked on them contentedly on and off. Then he pushed her mouth shut. No further questions, and he worked his jaw open further, taking her as he pleased. She let him. His tongue drew out everything slowly, then faster and harder, curling his tongue and licking her juices out. He tried to be patient, but her scent and taste overwhelmed the wolf. He needed more, and though she started to thrash in pleasure, he decided her body was not reacting quickly enough; he was impatient, his greed for more overtaking him. He withdrew his hands, one from his cock and the other from where it had wandered to her breasts, and drew a glyph into his palm.
Golden light shattered the darkness for a moment.
"What?---" was all the time she had to ask before the scent of something sweet filled her bed. His hands massaged her, healing the slight soreness and bringing a fresh, swelling ache to be filled. She moaned, her clit and her hole pulsing with renewed desire for him. Delicate perfume had filled the air. The scent wasn’t quite a raspberry or a strawberry. It wasn’t a blackberry or a bramble. She was wet and aching, her body bursting with coolness and heat.
"Mistberry," he sighed, but it sounded more guttural, like the rumble of an animal, or the warning of a great beast. "I have not had a taste for time without measure."
And without warning, he curled his great tongue into her, fat and heavy, and drove her hard against the bed, lifting her shaking legs over his wide shoulders. She moaned as his teeth pressed hard against her swollen clit, but caused no harm, only giving her the slightest edge of painful pleasure that she needed to send her over another devastating time, just as his tongue licked back up her channel, scratching just exactly where she needed it. Her eyes flew open in screaming astonishment. Her vision was greeted not by the darkness of her canopy, but a black Void, red eyes and white pupils, thousands of them, all staring with the focus of predator upon prey at her. Her mind threatened to fracture.
Was this real? Were they in the Fade? Was reality bending, for she saw black fur and white vicious teeth. His scent. The feel of his fingers.
She was filled with the space between the stars.
She accepted it.
She was feeling tongues everywhere; on her breasts, her cunt, the pleasure rising, and she was unafraid, because he was there, everywhere around her in the darkness. She didn’t close her eyes, only stared into the Void, watching the eyes, the millions of eyes as they took in her pleasure, and she greedily reached for all the pleasure he ruthlessly wrung out of her. The eyes above her, red against white sclera, narrowed in approval. He held her up, her legs against his chest, then pinned her against his mouth. He lapped at the walls of her cunt, stuffed so hard and so thick she could hardly breathe. As he pushed her down, she felt his tongue sneak into her mouth, the smell and taste of a strange, sweet berry and her own pleasures, and she clung to him, her arms wrapped around the great shaggy pelt of his shoulders.
(When had she added her fur blankets?)
She didn’t care, as long as he never stopped his fingers as they slid into her and along both sides of her clit, pinching and milking it, his mouth slanted overs, drinking her in like he could never walk away. She was mewling, crying, beating his shoulders and as she crested, coming down, and he snarled, actually slapping her clit a few times, viciously taking her over again. She yipped and shouted, howling her surprise into his mouth, but he was finally, finally, finally becoming satisfied with her reactions; he licked at her tears, and took all she had to give him.
"More, my mistberry creature, my one heart," he crooned into her ear.
'How?!'
The thought was a shrieking comet in her mind as her body crunched into another climax, but he just chuckled, that beloved sound in her ear as she rode the heat of her blaze.
She shivered but did not want this to stop. Not ever.
He laughed with real joy. A precious sound. She heard it in her mind again, delirious. This could not be real.
'My heart, my love. You're such a good, greedy girl.'
His last words were punctuated by fat thrusts of his fingers. The assault on her cunt had renewed its pace, and in her head, she heard his command, as clean as the moon, and as inevitable as the turn of the tide.
‘Come, and give it all to me! Clench down and release! Pour it out, and let yourself go; I must have it! Release! Release!’
She was helpless to his command. This time, she blacked out as she hurled into the Void, her body bucking and convulsing one final, devastating moment that seemed to tear her apart. She held her breath, unable to take in the air as pleasure wracked her frame. He pressed a hard kiss to her temple, her cheeks, the sides of her mouth as he finished, painting the sheets beside her with his seed. He was too ashamed of his need for her to finish on her body. He was too ashamed to do anything but attend to her body as the most fastidious of slaves of Arlathan ever were. She was unconscious, her mind falling into the Fade and her body utterly exhausted in an exquisite compliment of trust and love.
His heart leapt with painful joy. He wept. He was disgusted with himself, feeling shame as he wiped her down with the softest of clean cloths. He held her close to his trembling skin until dawn, feeling she was the most precious spirit he had ever known, the most important, and knowing he would soon slip away soon like the trickster and thief he was. He wished for the finest of elvhen perfumes to adorn her perfectly ruined body, aging every second in front of his slanted eyes. He wished for years to make love to her, to show her how he could fit his proud length into the depth of her, give her days of grinding on and off his fat knot, filling her with sticky seed.
He did not dare meet her in the Fade, for there he would be tempted to play out his real fantasies. He wanted to pull her into a rope harness, positioning her into the perfection of intricate designs that celebrated the trees, the earth, the moon, and the constellations. He wanted to bring her off with a well-timed tug of a rope knot, and display her at his feet. He wanted to read books of Elvhen epic poetry to her as he fed her mistberries from the halls of master potters, whose crafts were honed over hundreds of years. He wanted to see what she thought of the dark golden berries, which ripened for only three weeks every spring, in the highest peaks of Arlathan.
He didn't want to tell her that they fell extinct, like so much he loved, long ago, when he cast the Veil.
He had gently touched the anchor nestled deeply in her hand, feeling as it greedily gnawed into her bones, helpless to stop how it knit itself like a poisoned worm into her spirit. He would have taken it back from the beginning, but she had ever represented his failure and his weakness. She had come to represent his guilt now too.
“We were never gods.”
The snarl that escaped him was that of the wolf, and it came from a mouth with too many sharp teeth. He hated himself beyond words for the blurring of the lines between them. She was too bright, and he was too weak. He thought of the People. The broken People and the murdered Mythal. He cursed himself most of all. The next morning, wrapped sweetly in her blankets in Skyhold, alone in her bed, her first thought was that yet again, he had not claimed her.
Standing now before the rippling eluvian, she tightened her grip around long fingers smudged with ink and charcoal, cool and soothing, the nails perfectly filed. The beloved scholarly mage hands were calloused and invisibly bloody besides, but she felt them softly trembling.
“Solas. Come back to me.”
He moved immediately to pull his hand away, back through the mirror.
“Ar lath vir suledin.”
She was gentle and beseeching. For the first time since he had taken her arm and left her sobbing on her knees, she heard a heartbreaking, quiet reply.
“Ar lath ma, vhenan.”
When she woke up, the remnant of her left arm and her left shoulder felt a little better. Her body felt more stable, as was her resolve to keep fighting. She would prevent Solas from taking down the Veil, and stop him from making the same mistake twice. She would save Thedas again, no matter the cost to herself. She gripped her right hand, and made a fist. She refused to think of the feel of his hand in hers. It wasn’t real. It was only the Fade.
“Telanadas, Inquisitor,” she reminded herself.
She remembered Inquisitor Ameridan's lover and her sacrifice. 'Nothing is inevitable'.
‘And yet some things are,' she thought, as she got up to greet the day.