Chapter Text
He does not know how it all goes wrong this time.
One instant, he is carrying her towards the light. The next, she is gone. Torn from his arms as an unexpected surge sweeps over them. The light is blinding and the pull of it is overwhelming. It cracks him apart. He glimpses her, broken, breaking too, and his impotent cry of protest is lost to the all-consuming brightness.
No.
Please.
No.
But what mercy does fate ever afford to creatures such as himself?
Not for me. For her. Please, please… for her… she does not deserve…
There is no answer to his pleas. There is nothing; and then there is the world. Erupting around him, vast and terrifying, green and large and whole once again. The fires of devastation that had burned in their wake are gone. He is enfolded in light and then in green. Damp foliage that clings to his skin. Dizzy disorientation seizes him.
Everything is… off.
He attempts to sit up, but his limbs do not cooperate. He tries to move his head, and finds even that is a trial awkwardly beyond him. Everything hurts. It swims in painful flashes of light and colour, and even reaching for himself, or for the familiar comfort of his magic, is met with confused failure. Something touches his chest but it is far too large, proportionately, to be his hand.
And yet it moves with the desperate and disjointed attempts he is making. His efforts to look down are only vaguely successful. He glimpses skin, and movement - his limbs, perhaps? - but it makes no sense. It has if he has been shrunken down many times over, and rendered suddenly incapable of proper coordination.
Perhaps he has been injured beyond repair, he thinks. Perhaps his body has become mauled and devastated, and by some unexpected mercy he cannot feel the agony of it; perhaps the agony that lies elsewhere within him has consumed it, and left no room for any other kinds. He has failed. All his efforts, all that ruination, and for naught. He will die here, and change nothing. Save nothing. The destroyer of all things.
I am sorry.
He opens his mouth, but the sound that escapes him is nothing he has ever heard from his own lungs. It is shrill and piercing. An infant’s wail. Fate has seen fit to strip him of the capacity for less injured sounds, it seems.
It is some time before he realizes the truth.
The delay, he thinks, is only to be expected. He has never been a child before. Nor an infant, of course. There is no internal frame of reference within him for this level of helplessness. Not even on some long-forgotten, primal level. And so it is not until he is found by an alarmed and enormous elf, and carried away from his landing place, and confronted with the reality of his much-diminished stature, and the descriptions of him which escape his unfamiliar rescuer, that it all comes together.
An infant.
Somehow, his body’s shape has twisted, and taken on the form of an infant.
Go back, he thinks, frantically, at the elf who has found him. Go back! She could be there. She could be like this. She could…
But his mouth is incapable of forming the words. His aura conveys only crude sentiments. His emotions are a storm of misery, and all he is offered is base comfort and soothing. He cannot communicate. And deep down, beyond the light of this last, desperate hope, he knows the truth - she is not there. Few among the People would miss the sight of another infant in that forest grove. None who would rescue one would fail, then, to rescue another.
She is not there.
He opens his mouth, and lets loose another long, anguished wail.
~
He is in Mythal’s lands.
When he can manage coherence past the overwhelming rush of his misery, and the mingled feelings over his ‘success’ - and how it has manifested - he gathers this much. The elves do not dress as Dalish do, and they wear Mythal’s markings upon their faces. The air is rife with emotion. Vivid with the nearness of the Fade. The Dreaming. He has gone back, and changed form, and fallen into Mythal’s territory; and by luck, been found by her people, and not by some hungry predator. Or by no one at all.
Even his magic has slipped beyond the fringes of his grasp, and refuses to cooperate with him as much as his body does. The elves who discovered him are villagers. Humble folk who fret over the mystery of his sudden appearance; the calamity of a foundling, in an era when such things are nearly unheard of. They are not surprised by his misery, though it alarms them as well. They try to feed him, but he has no appetite, nor will to find one.
Still.
He must eat.
He must keep going; or it will be as he had first feared. All he has done, all he has destroyed, will be lost in vain.
His new caretakers see to him as best they are able to, given the very short notice of his arrival. They are a blur of kind, worried giants in his mind. Arms that hold him. Soothing sentiments that sweep over him. There is comfort in this, but it is a meagre balm to the deep misery that clutches at him. That, it seems, he lacks the wherewithal to fully suppress or avoid. Instead it crashes over him in waves, and he weeps. He weeps, and eats, and sleeps, and is comforted, in a bizarre cycle the persists even once his rescuers carry him across sloping roads, through eluvians and Crossroads and past thresholds, to the achingly familiar ground of Mythal’s palace.
The shock of it silences him.
Despite his plans, some part of him had never truly thought to see it again. He had almost forgotten the grandeur of the place. The sweeping chambers seem only that much more massive in his current state. The artful statuary, and fountains, and rich, verdant gardens all seem even more like a dream, under the circumstances, than his long years spent in sleep.
He is carried through the pathways resurrected like ghosts from his past, and brought before Mythal.
She is as she was on the cusp of her greatest glory; and greatest downfall. Not yet a goddess, but more than a queen. There is compassion in her eyes when she looks at him. And the spirit itself, too, curls around him, comforting in both the essence of its nature, and in the impossible relief of a presence he had never thought to encounter again. Compassion brushes light touches across his brow, and he reaches for it. Fingers curling around soft hands. Awed and silent.
Mythal bids the servant carrying him to bring him closer, and then she plucks him from their arms, and settles him into her own lap. She speaks soft words. The gentle nonsense noises meant to soothe infants, and inquiries that do not break from the comforting atmosphere. The vivid colours of her gown seem all the more potent. The bright glint of her jewellery is strangely alluring; and he finds himself reaching for it before he even recognizes the impulse to.
Before he can either retract or reach his target earring, however, Mythal catches his hand, and gently dissuades him. She cradles him with care, and he finds that after a time he has calmed enough to pay proper mind to the words being exchanged around him. Arrangements being made to see to his care.
He will be given to some loyal, high-ranking subject to raise, he suspects. Though Mythal’s gaze is soft upon him, she gives him back to the servant who had brought him without much hesitance, and makes no move to tend to him herself. It is almost a relief. He is not certain how much exposure to her he can stand, for good or ill. The familiarity of the people and surroundings pulls at him. The alien quality of his nature is disorienting. Grief and guilt and horror and shock all war within him, and he is not certain how to feel towards her. There is too much complexity to his sentiments. Too much time has passed.
In the end, it is as he suspects. A ranking subject who had petitioned for parenthood is entrusted with his care.
He finds himself blinking unexpectedly up into a familiar face.
Its owner’s name is buried deep enough in his memories that it takes him some time to find it. Tarensa. One of Mythal’s most loyal attendants. She is very careful when she holds him; but more practiced at it than some of his rescuers had seemed. He thinks he recalls that she had a child, once. Or has he changed that, now? Denied yet another life by displacing it in the sequence of events? The thought brings more tears to him, and at least he will grant this to recommend it – being an infant gives one plenty of time to weep.
Tarensa carries him to a nursery. Soft light, filtered through multi-coloured glass, fills the rooms and layers dancing patterns across the ceiling. Her wife – Solas cannot recall her name for the life of him – coos at him, and sets up a mobile of gently gleaming stars above his crib. Small, blooming vines trail into the room around the edges of the windows, and his clothes are soft, and the voices which speak to him are gentle and tender. The hands which brush his head are careful, almost reverent.
“Is he not perfect, Nurevas?” Tarensa asks her wife.
“No one is ever perfect, my heart. But he is close,” Nurevas replies, brushing careful fingers across his cheeks.
“Do you still want to go with Renehn for the name?”
“Hmm. I do not know. He cries such heartbreaking little tears. Naming him for joy seems almost like it would be mocking him right now.”
“Or perhaps encouraging?” Taresnsa suggests, though without force. “Well. It is your choice. I named our Samala, after all.”
Nurevas turns the mobile, and Solas watches the stars shift and dance overhead. The light makes him think of moonbeams scattered in a grove. Of tides of time shifting and overtaking him, pulling his heart from his arms and destroying him, utterly, only to remake him. His own doing. He has lost everything, and regained all but what he most wants, and he could see no other way. But even so.
Even so.
He bursts into tears.
They call him ‘Numehn’.
~
Elvhenan is a place of many splendors, and many wonders. And for a child, it is also a place of great safety.
And, in the case of a child who is not a child, frustration.
There is much to be done, and Solas has somehow managed to land himself in a position very far and away from actually being able to do it. He is trapped here, behind the bars of his crib, in the arms of his well-meaning caretakers. In gentle gardens and soft-lit playrooms. It leaves him a great deal of time for his thoughts. For his regrets. Almost as if fate is mocking him, keeping him safe and sound, and utterly inept. Basking him in an abundance of all the little pieces of the world he came from – the beauty, the abundant emotions, the nearness of dreams – and denying him his goal.
As if to say ‘here, you wished so badly to restore this world – have it’. But he did not wish to restore it so that he could wrap himself in the comfort of familiar things. He would not have sacrificed so much of worth, caused so much suffering, for that. He restored so that it could be saved; so that his people might have a future that could be sustained.
He does not want to sit here, idly, and be coddled.
But his legs refuse to carry him, for a long while. And then once they do, lifting him to take tottering steps, he knows they cannot carry him far. A lone child in Elvhenan would draw notice aplenty. He tries to shift his form, to take on a more adult shape, but though his magic is stronger than it has been in ages, in this, it denies him. His form has been remade. It is new to him, and it demands he come to know it before it will change for him.
And so he is left to his thoughts. And they haunt him, carrying all the misery he has caused with them. He sees the faces of those he has killed. Or gotten killed. Hears their voices.
He sees her, over and over again. Tired and bloodied and almost dead, missing parts that he took from her. Looking towards him, defeated and awaiting the end. He had never wanted her to suffer.
He had doomed her to it, inevitably, excessively.
Tarensa finds him crying in the midst of his soft block toys, and plucks him up.
“Numehn,” she croons at him, rocking him. “It is alright, little one. You are safe now. Nothing bad will happen to you.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, and lets himself draw comfort from the waves of reassurance she is sending towards him. Even if he does not deserve it. He can hardly live to see all this cost pay for something – anything at all – if he surrenders now. Now that it has all been done.
He remembers Varric, talking to him about his dream of the lone man on the island.
Sometimes carrying on is all that remains.
Nurevas approaches her wife from behind, and wraps her arms around the both of them. She kisses the top of his head. And then she begins to sing. A low and gentle song, that he remembers from days long past; and newly reborn. It does not ease the misery in him. But it seems like it gives it shape. Lets it be, as it is; as it settles into place inside of him, and no longer devours the whole of his thoughts.
There is no point in dwelling upon a problem for which there is no possible solution.
Even rebirth does not change what he became. What he did. They were real. She was real.
He murmurs along with the tune, as his emotions settle. Nurevas kisses his head again, and Tarensa sighs.
“Poor little darling. I wish we knew what had hurt you so,” she says. “I wish we could put them to justice for it.”
So do I, Solas thinks.
~
Numehn is a worrying child, Solas knows.
He does not disguise himself very well. There are days he is not even certain he should bother to try; but the consequences he can foresee should he divulge the truth all seem uniformly negative. And so he keeps it to himself, but he plays his deception poorly.
He has never been a child, nor spent any particular abundance of time with them. His understanding of childhood comes more from brief acquaintanceships, and mentoring young adults, and reading about the workings of a child’s mind, then from being one or having one. He knows he does things improperly. He speaks too well, when his mouth finally manages to cooperate with him. He coordinates and reorients himself too quickly. Walks too steady, too soon, and fine-tunes his emotional signals too swiftly.
A prodigy, his caretakers call him. But there is an edge of discomfort with it, that only relaxes when he permits himself to indulge in the comfort of affection. To be held, and kissed, and comforted. He knows his lack of cheer is telling. Knows, too, that his attempts to falsify it are pathetic. The things he takes genuine joy in are few and far between. As he grows from awkward toddler to gangly, freckled child, he remains solemn and prone to long introspection, and too much grief.
And it is strange, too, to be comforted in the fashion in which adults approach him. Tarensa is the first to realize that he prefers simple reasoning and straight-forward communication to vague platitudes or insincere reassurances. Everything will be alright slides off of him like water on a duck’s back, when he knows he is the only one who can ensure that fate does not follow its same disastrous course.
The world remains in his hands, and his hands are tiny.
Nurevas picks up on the trend from her wife. They are good parents, Solas thinks. They are loving and careful and accepting. If they are disappointed in their child who cries too much and reads too quickly and prefers strange comforts, they rarely show it. And Samala, their daughter, is indulgent and sweet and brings him gifts in abundance, and her smile is so infectious that Solas can genuinely return it, at times.
Shy, she calls him.
My sorrowful child, Nurevas deems him, before she sings him lullabies to carry him off to sleep.
Wounded, Tarensa decides, with a sad twist to her mouth and worry on her brow. Who wounded a child? he knows she wonders. He does not have the words to tell her that he is a wolf who chewed off his own paws. But there are days he wishes he did.
It is Tarensa, then, who catches him trying to climb one of the garden walls when his new body is nine years old, and takes him to the practice fields instead. And she gives him a wooden staff, and has him follow her steps. Steps he knows, and recalls, even if his muscles do not. And steps he never learned, for styles he had no inclination to master in his first life.
Not before everyone who knew them had died, anyway.
He does well enough at that, it seems, that Nurevas decides to begin giving him dance lessons as well. And she takes him with her to her practices with the other dancers, who coo and fuss and guide him through steps, as spirits of Grace and Joy and Rhythm flow through them. Their light, dreamspun hands catching his own. He dances in steps he never learned, too, before they were lost. Dance he never knew had existed before they were gone.
And now they are not, Not anymore. But that makes him think of the cost. It makes him think of other dances, in opulent palaces, and stiff formal clothing. Of strong hands in his own, and the turn of her lips when she smiled.
When he ends the session in tears, Nurevas only picks him up, though, and carries him back to their quarters with her.
“You have a sensitive soul,” she tells him. “That is no bad thing.”
No, he thinks. It is not.
His crimes are many times worse than that.
But there is nothing for them, as he grows and excels in his studies. He better at downplaying his skills than his cognitive development, at least. It is simpler to pretend to be learning at things he already knows how to do; although mostly, he fails to express an interest in the crafts where most of his mastery lies, and instead takes up those which are genuinely new to him. Which did not hold much interest for him, when he was newly embodied, and drifting through these palace walls.
His tutors praise him, for the most part. He learns music and sculpting, dance and combat, needlework and husbandry. It is easiest, he finds, when he is attempting something exceptionally challenging and precise. Something which demands his focus. Which swallows up the whole of his attention, so that it cannot go elsewhere. In those moments, he does not forget. But he cannot dwell, either. He threads delicate, breakable strands through the eyes of needles, and knows that he cannot breathe wrong for a moment without shattering them and undoing hours of labour. He practices complex steps and patterns, the sequences of which must stand in the forefront of his thoughts, if he is not to lose track of them. He balances leaves on the edges of his staff, and memorizes songs with hundreds of verses, and rewrites his world in singular, lived moments, to avoid being dragged back into the agony of his past.
And in dreams, he goes back.
In memories he sits with Felassan, and discusses faith with Cassandra, and plays chess with Iron Bull. He listens to Cole speak of the wealth of the world he has discovered, and reads Varric’s books, and endures Sera’s pranks.
Sometimes he goes further back. To days when he wandered in dreams. He sits with a keeper whose hound once chased him off; a man he had honestly meant only to help, and whom he had resented for denying him.
“You were right to,” he says, now. “Your hound scented a wolf, and you were right. Your legends were always right. I destroyed your people, even if it was not done out of hatred for them.”
In the dream, the keeper does not curse him. Does not attack him. Instead the man falls to his knees, weathered hands clutching his marked face, and weeps. The dream turns to ash and dust, and when Solas wakes, the sunlight is cold on his cheeks. And the beauty of Mythal’s palace feels hollow, and pointless.
He dances until he cannot think of it anymore. And then he repeats the process, at night, as he goes back again and again.
He could stop it, he knows. But it is the only penance he can pay without destroying himself. He is the only one who remembers them, now. Remembers that world. Those people.
Remembers her.
When he is fourteen, he sculpts her.
Her face is a memory he has preserved with all the skill of his thousands of years in dreams and visions, hanging on to lost and forgotten things. The clay his sculpts with is smooth and perfect, and he slides his hands carefully across it, shaping cheekbones and ears and eyes, careful features that he first saw lying on a chantry floor. Locked in irons. Even then, he had marvelled at her; if only for surviving what she should not have.
He shapes her lips, and the bridge of her nose, and the curve of her neck. The bust, when it is done, is his best piece by far. No one is surprised when he weeps over it. Moved to tears by his accomplishment, they say. For that is what Numehn does. He finishes as task, and then he weeps. But they do ask over his model.
The easy answer – to say that he dreamed her – lies upon his tongue. There are so many things to be found in dreams, after all. But it does not come. He cannot bring himself to call her a dream. To imply that she is some mere figment, or memory. Even if that is what his own actions reduced her to. She did not deserve to be a sacrifice.
“She is my heart,” he confesses to Nurevas, when she presses the issue.
She looks at him a moment, and then cups his cheek.
“We all have ideals,” she tells them. “But few of us ever meet them. I would not have you settle for anything less than the fullness of love, my son. But do not cleave to sculptures and dreams so tightly that you let the unexpected kinds pass you by, when they come.”
And that is when he realizes.
He is doing it again.
He is losing himself in the past, in what he has lost, and letting the present suffer for it. For he cannot bring back the dead, but there are living elves now who care about him. There are other forms of love all around him, and even if he does not deserve them, he does injury to others by ignoring them, too. Because Nurevas loves him, and Tarensa loves him, and Samala loves him. Because the spirits still flock to him, even though it has been so long since they were his proper kin. Because his teachers, and the dancers, and the soldiers who occupy the training grounds all extend their hands to him.
Just as she did.
And it is reflex, bred into him unwittingly by all that has transpired in his life, to turn them away. To take everything and hold it himself, until his weak arms give out, and it all spills from his grasp just the same. Tumbling to the ground, because he cannot hold it all, and he could not let another take this burden; and so instead it breaks upon the ground. Glass shards slicing open his skin.
He tries, after that.
He keeps the bust he made, and lets her face remind him. For all the reasons he gave her to despise him, she would never permit him to let it all, in the end, be in vain. Solas, she would say, in that steady way she had, when she knew she was about to confront something disastrous in him. When he had deceived her. Rejected her. Left her.
Betrayed her, by throwing the world she defended onto the pyre of sacrifice.
Solas. Who does this self-flagellation serve? What’s done is done. Denying yourself a life won’t bring justice to it. It’s spitting in the ocean of what you did.
Sometimes he imagines her hurling accusations at him.
That is easier than when he supposes she would not. When he imagines her tired voice in his ear, resigned and hurt and defeated. And still gentle with him, somehow.
With all that has happened, at least try to be happy, he can hear her say. I always did want you to be happy.
He prefers the accusations.
Kindness from those ignorant of his crimes is easier to take, as well. And he does his best to return it. To foster it where he can. He makes an effort to take the hands offered to him, and to try to heal at least what can be healed. He is gentle with those who have been gentle with him. Not that he was cruel, before. But he was cold, he knows. Too distant to see closely. When his eyes focus, he recalls what it is to be compassionate.
The spirit helps him keep it in his mind.
All the spirits do in their way, in fact. He chases Curiosity through the libraries again. A spirit once more, free and enthusiastic, eager to pry apart every mystery he can offer it. Rage stalks him and Sorrow is a near-constant companion, and he recalls their fates. It does not make what he did easier to stand. But it reminds him of why he did it, at least.
When he sixteen, a new spirit arrives to join the rest.
It turns him cold again.
Pride is shining and strong, and longs for wisdom. Open and eager, and powerful. It rushes through the halls of Mythal’s palace, casting emerald light in its wake. The light he last saw sparking acrossher flesh. Bleeding from the Veil. The light that cast the world into darkness.
But he does not hate Pride. It is a spirit, like any other. And it is so far from what he is, now. It is gentle and curious and boastful and free. It knows it is dangerous, in its way. All things are. Solas wishes he could explain that so that he would be sure the spirit understood. He wishes he could chase it forever away from the notion of taking on a physical form.
He wishes it could become Wisdom, just as it desires.
But he knows. It will fail.
It will always fail.
When he sixteen, he catches the Spirit of Pride, and shatters it. Emerald light across his palms. Shards that fling themselves through the Dreaming. The air burns and something in him screams, and he does not hate this spirit. He does not want to do it. But he has done so very much that he does not want to do; and he cannot risk it all in refraining from this.
And some part of him, he knows, wants so badly to destroy himself. The same part of him that dashes the remaining shards to yet smaller fragments, and scatters them away.
His crime is done in silence, in secret. In a move no one expects, with strength he is not supposed to have. No one, he thinks, would suspect him. But even so. Even so, when it is done, he cannot stay. The green light of his memory spills all across the walls of the palace, no matter how he tries to move forward. To blink it away again. No dance steps banish the blood from his mind. No needlework eases the memories of death and suffering. The songs do not quiet the screams, and the peace seems an affront.
He resents them, too, he realizes. His own people. He resents that they brought the world to where it was. Not only the evanuris, but those who followed them. Who gave up their strength to them. He has given all for them, and he resents them, because they cannot give it back.
Because he thinks he would prefer a quiet life, in some humble corner of a dying world, with someone who loved him, to this. To this eternal, unending quest for things just beyond reach.
At least the spirit will never just how badly it would have failed.
By cover of night, he flees the palace.
He flees the whole of it. Mythal’s lands, and Arlathan, and the eluvian networks. He vanishes, off into the wilds, and then down into the depths, and the roads that had gone dark in his time. The pathways wrought with ancient dwarven magic and skill, traced through buried wilderness as vital and vibrant as anything on the surface.
It is time, he thinks, to change the world again.
To save it, for those he loves.