Chapter Text
Nearing on its fourth century, the Glandival'as Opera House wore its age beautifully.
Gilt molding traced the edges of private boxes that rose in curving tiers above the main floor, their velvet curtains a deep wine-dark shade that swallowed light rather than reflecting it. The ceiling vaulted overhead in painted splendor—scenes of ancient Arlathan in its glory, before the fall, when magic had flowed through the world like water and the immortal Dreamers had walked among their creations without fear.
Solas had always found the paintings historically inaccurate and aesthetically excessive, although the artist was immensely skilled.
Tonight he barely noticed them.
He sat in one of the higher boxes, far enough from the stage that the performance below became almost abstract—movement and sound rather than individual performers. The opera was something classical that he'd agreed to attend weeks ago when the engagement had seemed reasonable and he'd expected to have good news to share.
That was before it began to sour.
"You are brooding."
Flemeth's voice carried across the small space without rising above a conversational tone. She sat in the diagonal chair in front of him, her attention apparently focused on the stage below, though Solas knew better than to assume her focus was anywhere other than exactly where she wanted it to be.
"I am observing," he intoned without lifting his chin from his fist.
"You are radiating displeasure so intensely I am surprised the singers have not faltered." She turned to look at him then, her golden eyes bright with amusement in the dim light. "What has happened to disturb my usually unflappable old friend?"
"Nothing of consequence."
Her knowing hum was very much a reflection of the—sometimes terrifying—mother that she was. She settled back in her chair, the picture of relaxed attention.
"You have been agitated for days. Your students have noticed. I am sure that if your colleagues had bothered to look beyond their own noses they would have noticed as well. I suspect, even, that your archaeologist friend's cat has noticed, and it is a remarkably lazy and unobservant creature."
Solas inspected his fingernails—one still bore paint. "There is a musician."
"Like pulling teeth from a grumpy wolf," she cooed. "A musician! How prosaic."
"She has been—" He stopped, searching for the right word. Interfering? Destroying? Transforming? "—altering my compositions. Publicly. The performances have gone viral. People are calling her work an improvement."
Flemeth's eyebrows rose with delicate interest. "And is it?"
"That is not the point."
"You are right, it is much more than that." She leaned forward slightly, her gaze sharpening, though she was still not looking at him. "They must not be simple alterations if you are losing sleep. Unless you have suddenly let yourself become concerned with the ephemeral trivialities of the internet. In a week, they will forget."
Not this time, he thought. And then he told her. About the viral videos, about the flowers blooming. Then standing in the Veridium Atrium and watching his work be wrenched open like a corpse, exposed, and picked through. He omitted where it had been given a different heart and reanimated to a state of vibrant vigor it had never been coloured with previously. He would tell no one about the part where Ouroboros had heard his lost voice and brought it forward. Those details did not serve him.
Flemeth listened without interrupting, her expression giving nothing away.
When he finished, she was quiet for a while. The opera swelled toward its second act climax—something dramatic about betrayal and consequence that Solas had lost the thread of entirely.
"Flowers," Flemeth said at last. The word carried no incredulity.
"Yes."
"From a single performer, working alone without any understanding of what she was touching?"
"As far as I can determine, yes."
"Oh, Solas." The amusement had not left her voice, but it had deepened—delight and concern braided together. "Someone has wandered into your web and instead of getting caught, she has started playing the strings. And you are sitting here sulking about it. Did you truly think there would be no consequences before the final act?"
"She is destabilising work I have spent years—"
"She is destabilising work you left vulnerable to precisely this." Flemeth's interruption was gentle but firm. "You built something designed to be the only voice in the room. Now someone else is singing, and instead of listening to what that tells you, you are having what amounts to an artistic tantrum."
He briefly glared at the back of her head.
"The Veil is thinning," she continued, quieter not softer—Flemeth did not do soft. "You have been ensuring it. Magic bleeds through in ways you anticipated and ways you did not. Dormant abilities wake. People who have lived their entire lives believing they were mundane suddenly find themselves capable of impossible things. Did you truly expect that no one else would feel what you have been doing? That the world would simply hold still while you rearranged its foundations again?"
"I accounted for—"
"You accounted for instruments. For nodes and frequencies and the mathematics of resonance." Her golden eyes found his and held them. "You did not account for a person. And people, lethallin, are what you have not had an easy time predicting since you first woke up."
Below, the second act ended. Applause rose from the crowd, a dull, polite roar. Solas barely heard it.
"She is dangerous," he said lowly.
"Of course she is dangerous. She made flowers bloom with your music and she did not even know she was doing it or how! Hah! The music plays on after all these years, if a little changed, and so we keep dancing! I am delighted to witness your discomfort in the face of it."
"Your delight is noted and unwelcome."
"My delight is earned." She was smiling now, private and sharp. She was enjoying herself enormously at his expense and saw no reason to apologise for it. "The Dread Wolf, undone by a cellist. There is a symmetry to it that borders on poetry."
"I am not undone."
"You are sitting in an opera box ignoring perfectly adequate Chasind melodrama because you cannot stop thinking about a cellist who played your composition better than you wrote it. That is, at minimum, somewhat undone. And she will do more if left unchecked. Or if checked, depending on how you direct that power."
Solas turned to look at her fully, hands gripping his armrests. "What are you suggesting?"
"I am suggesting," she said, "that you stop treating this musician as a problem to be solved and start seeing her as a resource to be utilised, Fen'Harel. Or have you forgotten yourself, Trickster?"
The third and final act commenced. A spotlight fell upon a solitary soprano dressed in elaborate armour inaccurate to the period.
"How would I even—" He stopped, frustrated by his own uncertainty. "I cannot approach her directly. She performs in underground venues, surrounds herself with people who have no respect for formal training or institutional authority. She would not listen to anything I had to say."
"No," Flemeth agreed. "She would not. Not if you approached her as Professor Solas, Conservatory instructor and defender of structural integrity." Her smile widened. "But you are not merely a professor, are you? You are also F.H. The mysterious rebel composer whose work they all find so compelling and that she cannot help but challenge." She laughed lowly, a sort of throaty thing. "How delightfully fitting."
"I am not revealing my identity to some reckless—"
"I did not suggest you reveal anything." Flemeth leaned back, crossing one leg over the other as she waved a hand lackadaisically. "I do suggest you speak to her in the only language she seems to hear clearly. Music."
Solas curled his fingers into a loose fist as he turned his head to regard her in thought.
"She responds to your compositions," Flemeth continued. "She hears elements in them that others miss. She finds the places where you have built constraints and treats them as invitations to explore. This is not sabotage—this is engagement. She is in conversation with you, Solas, whether you like it or not. The question is whether you will answer."
"And say what, precisely? Engagement destabilises."
"Yet engaging will allow you to wrest back control and correct. Write something for her. Specifically for her—for what she does, for how she hears. Make it a challenge, an invitation, a puzzle she cannot resist solving." Flemeth's voice had taken on the cadence it assumed when she was no longer merely advising but shaping—arranging the pieces on a board that only she could see the full dimensions of. "Draw her to you through the music. Once you have her attention, you can begin to guide that power toward something useful rather than chaotic."
"You want me to manipulate her."
"I want you to survive long enough to complete what you started." Her tone remained light, but something harder ran beneath it. "The Inquisition is closing in. You know this. Inquisitor Lavellan is in the city, and he is very good at what he does. Every performance this musician gives in your borrowed voice draws more attention, creates more disturbances in the resonance field. Eventually someone or something will connect her to the larger pattern." Her fingers flicked in his direction. "Eventually, it will connect you to her."
He moved his fists to his lap. "And your solution is to make that connection deliberate."
"Only to make that connection useful, lethallin. Right now she is a wild variable, disrupting your work without knowing it. But if you can direct her—teach her to channel resonance in ways that strengthen rather than destabilise—she becomes an asset."
"And if she refuses? If she realises what I am doing?"
"Then you will have learned something valuable about how she works, and you can adjust accordingly." Flemeth's smile turned almost fond. "You have always been so careful, Solas. So disciplined. Every variable accounted for, every outcome predicted. But life is not a composition that can be perfected on paper. Sometimes you must improvise."
The word landed strangely, echoing something he'd heard in Ouroboros' playing—the willingness to follow something interesting wherever it led, consequences be damned.
"Write the piece," Flemeth said. "Be bold! Call it 'Ouroboros' so there is no mistaking who it is for. Make it beautiful and complex and just difficult enough that she will want to solve it. Give her space to improvise—she clearly needs that—but build in structures that will guide her power in useful directions."
"You make it sound simple."
"It is simple. Whether it is easy is another matter entirely. But you have always loved a challenge." She rose, smoothing her deep garnet dress with elegant motions. "You are running out of time, and out of options. The ritual requires the resonance network to be complete and stable—which is why the sulahn'assan was necessary to acquire. This musician is currently threatening that stability. You can either spend your energy fighting her, or you can use her to strengthen what you have built."
Solas remained seated, his mind already racing through possibilities. A composition specifically for her. Something that would catch her attention, draw her in, make her seek him out...
"How do I ensure she finds it?" he asked. "If I release it as F.H., there is no guarantee she will believe it authentic enough to perform it."
"I think you can trust her curiosity." Flemeth moved toward the box's exit. "Especially if you title it after her. She will want to know what you heard, what you think she is. That kind of attention is irresistible to someone who has been overlooked by formal institutions."
"You seem very certain."
"I am experienced with patterns of behaviour." She paused at the curtain, half in the light, half in shadow, and she looked exactly like what she was—ancient and formidable and always playing a longer game than anyone ever suspected. "She is skilled and hungry for recognition and connection even if she pretends otherwise. You are offering exactly that—recognition from the one composer she cannot stop thinking about." Flemeth's expression softened slightly. "Just be careful not to lose yourself in the performance. You are not actually trying to forge a real connection. You are trying to use her."
The reminder was unnecessary and uncomfortable. He was so tired of using and hurting people. But he was also determined to finally end this.
"When should I release it?" Solas asked, though he did so absently—it was something he could figure out for himself.
"Soon. Give her time to find it, to obsess over it, to attempt it herself." Flemeth pulled back the curtain, letting in a sliver of light from the corridor beyond. "And then, when she comes looking for answers—as she will—you will be ready."
She left without waiting for a response, the curtain falling closed behind her with a whisper of fabric.
Solas remained in the box long after she'd gone, his attention far from the stage. His mind was already composing, hearing the piece before it existed—something that would speak directly to what he'd witnessed in her playing. The reckless passion, the instinctive understanding of resonance, the way she heard possibilities where he'd written constraints. A story.
He would give her what she wanted. Space to improvise, structures to explore, harmonies that would challenge her technical ability while seeming to reward her interpretive instincts.
And underneath it all, woven so carefully she would never notice, he would build resonance patterns that would strengthen his work. He would teach her to channel power in useful directions while making her believe she was choosing freely.
It was manipulation.
But it was also survival, for the sake of magic and the world.
And if some small part of him was genuinely curious about what she would do with a composition written specifically for her gifts—well. That was irrelevant to the larger purpose.
Below, the opera reached its tragic conclusion. Betrayal, love, and manipulation, the inevitable price of ambition.
Solas barely heard the final aria.
He was too busy hearing something else entirely—the first notes of 'Ouroboros' taking shape in his mind like a trap disguised as an invitation.