Chapter Text
Ixchel sat with her head covered and thoughts racing, watching the road behind them through a thin opening between the cart’s wooden slats. She kept watching long after the agents vanished into the woods, and the woods vanished into the fog, and the fog melted away into daylight.
She told herself what she had told Halevune. She told herself what she had been telling herself for a while now:
The prejudice and pain that choked Thedas had been there before her, and it would be there afterward—and it was not wrong to try and change that. It was not wrong to empower others to act for change. And the responsibility was not on her to take personal blame for every choice others made, for every ripple that turned into a wave.
Maybe Cassandra would have an easier time believing that than Ixchel was. Or maybe Ixchel was kidding herself.
It felt like hours before she managed to rip her eyes away from what they had left behind. She put her back to the road, closed her eyes, and tried to think about anything else lest her worries happened to summon troubles to her.
Fortunately, they crossed the Imperial Highway without seeing another soul on the road, and finally left the woodlands for good. To the west, the grassy fields at the border of Orlais’ heartlands gave way to the rocky Western Approach. The desert was a yellow ocean, unmoving even as they continued their northern path. And as the ground swelled beneath their feet, lifting Val Foret’s foothills up like a sentry, it was possible to see a hint of the pale Abyssal Reach on the southern horizon.
Ixchel had briefly wondered why Briala's forces had been stationed so far west, when the conflict seemed so centralized. Now, she wondered if perhaps they had picked their station to keep the war contained. She wondered if they had stopped its spread to the more isolated communities in the far reaches of the Empire. Were tensions high there, as they were in the cities where humans and elves lived on top of each other, and class divides were severely enforced? Or were such things faint concerns to the populations living on the outskirts of society anyway?
One thing seemed certain: there would be no ambushes here, unless the hawks circling overhead decided that there were too many rabbits among them.
-:-:-
Late that night, Ixchel and Solas sat a ways out from camp to look up at the stars. She wasn’t sure what had pulled them out of the circle of the fire, but as she lay in his arms and basked in the moonlight, she felt transported back to a particular night on the Exalted Plains.
“I could go for a drink,” Ixchel sighed.
Solas chuckled. “Do you not recall the hangover the next day?" he asked, clearly recalling the same moment. "Your pulse nearly broke the skin.”
“Yes, but you took care of that,” she pointed out. “And it was worth it.”
“At least we are unlikely to be tasked with herding halla in the morning,” Solas teased. But as she turned her cheek toward him, she felt a tension take over his breathing.
She knew what weighed on his mind.
“Are you going to go looking for Cassandra tonight?” she asked quietly.
Solas forced himself to breathe in deep and slow, as if to internalize her words and give them their due. She thought it would be a simple answer, and when his silence drew out even longer, she rolled onto her stomach and elbows to get a better gauge of his expression.
There was a dark humor written across the slant of his mouth, and it gained a tinge of guilt when he met her eye and saw that she was taken aback.
“I do believe Charter’s assessment was correct,” he said. “Cassandra is unlikely to be in immediate danger in that golden cage. I will confirm as much, or try to—but there is little else to do.”
“What were you smirking at?” she asked. “The thought of Cassandra throwing books at priests, or something?’
Solas turned his head away, snorting. “I don’t know why the thought did not occur to me. Surely…”
She nudged him, and he grew serious again. He folded his hands across his stomach and frowned up at the sky. “I was noticing familiar echoes. Lieutenants imprisoned. Spies caught too deep in their own web of lies to escape. Weeks of silence turning to months of worry… And the increasingly painful question: do they want rescue, or would we be dispelling a carefully painted illusion?"
Ixchel nodded slowly.
"Then, I had a moment of clarity. This is the future Divine: a force to be reckoned with, a woman with singular drive and her own motivations, on a mission of her own design... How foolish it is to imagine that Cassandra is simply your lieutenant.” Solas shook his head. “To think of where we each began a mere year ago, and now you both are facing challenges and lessons it took me centuries to encounter—let alone internalize.”
He looked down at her solemnly. “I laughed at myself for being blinded by my own pride once again.”
“I guess we can dizzy ourselves plenty without drinking,” Ixchel replied, dry and weary. “If we go down that road imagining who we are to each other and to the outside, I’m sure we’ll get headaches eventually.”
“Certainly,” he agreed.
They lapsed into silence for a while, but as Ixchel rested her cheek on his chest again she could tell they were both discontented: she could not figure out how to breathe at a normal pace, either finding that she held it too long or let it out and in again too fast; he kept fidgeting with his fingers until he was fully wringing his hands.
“Well,” she said eventually. “Do you have any advice?”
“Whatever I have learned came too late, or came from you yourself.” That wiped any trace of humor from his voice, and his hands went still on his stomach. “Trust. That is the crux of the matter, anyway.”
Ixchel sat up then and pulled her knees to her chin, looking up through her lashes at the starry sky. “Yeah,” she murmured. “I trust Cassandra.”
“As do I—on many levels. If she can maneuver her imprisonment and escape well enough, she will shape generations to come on this continent for the better.”
Ixchel ruminated on his words for a while in silence. She knew so little about his tenure as a leader, and yet she knew his heart and her own; trust was something she held bloody and raw in her fists, arms outstretched in offering and in entreaty, and yet it was an exercise every time in handing it over. Trust, fragile cousin of hope, each so easily tangled in chains by empathy or need for control—or both.
A question rose within her, and she half-turned her head to look at him, but she was afraid to ask. From the way he looked at her in turn, she knew he recognized her wariness.
She hoped that having such difficult conversations in the Waking world would be easier than in the Fade, where everything felt so immediate, urgent, and raw. The cool night air felt like an insulating layer between them now, and it was a welcome one as she decided to broach the topic.
“You could not be everywhere at once in an Empire,” she said quietly. “You blame yourself for so much. But can you look back now at any of it and see something you did right?”
Her words were clumsy, she knew, and she failed to hold back the apology that rushed from her. “I know you can—and even more than that, some sacrifices might not be called ‘right,’ even if they were necessary. But—”
Solas put a hand on her arm as he sat up, and she fell into morose silence.
“When life stretches on for so long, there is no such thing as a decision, or an outcome,” he said. “Every action I took led to this moment, and I am all too aware of the blood and pain that filled the centuries between then and now.” He crossed his legs and laced his fingers together in his lap, looking up at the sky with her. “And yet, yes, there is one story I can tell that bears none of my regrets.
“I believe you already know the story of the Slow Arrow, as it was told to you by Briala and by Felassan in turn. In the abstract, it can be a lesson about choosing one’s words carefully. It is a wise consideration when making requests of fickle and uncaring lords.” Solas’s voice was wry and a little pained, as if often was when he spoke on the poor reputation of the Dread Wolf. “The story is about many things, but what I hear in it is a series of impossible choices and immense trust.
“The other Evanuris used cruelty as a tool to cement their power when threatened. Falon’Din in particular used it to sooth his insecurities and vanity, cultivating fear as proxy to love. But you may be surprised to hear that Andruil and Ghilan’nain were not much interested in power or control. They had each other. They sought a different kind of glory.
“Andruil and Ghilan’nain tortured purely for entertainment and abstract purpose,” Solas continued darkly. “It was not always so, of course. Their people were once valued workers, warriors, artisans… Their people prayed to them, sacrificed to them, and toiled in their service, and for a time they found great reward from their wild goddesses. But as Andruil’s desires remained unsatiated and Ghilan’nain’s ingenuity lost its aim, those prayers became pleas—pleas you have heard yourself, in the prayers that are still remembered.
“Eventually, no amount of prayer or payment mattered. It was impossible to flee from the Huntress. All that was left was a most fragile hope that someone might save them.”
Solas’s lip curled. “The terrible creature that lay in wait for us through Andruil’s eluvian was Ghilan’nain’s,” he said, “and worst of all—it was made from her own people.”
Ixchel could not help the shiver that wracked her frame, and the skin of her arm prickled where that monster had once ripped into her flesh. She could hear its horrible voice as plain as when it had surrounded her in the bloody dark.
FENHARELHARELLAN.
“I had been Andruil’s prey before,” Solas said darkly. “Between her and Ghilan’nain, I was outmatched. Even the whole host of my rebellion could not have stood against them—though many wished to, even if it meant their doom. It was a dark time, and I was accused by plenty of being as distant as the Evanuris for letting the goddesses continue to hunt as they were. I often believed them.”
“But Felassan did not,” Ixchel guessed quietly, noting that he blinked at Felassan’s name but did not wince.
He remained composed, though what he said next was clearly difficult to stomach even now. “Gods are those who think they can decide who lives and dies. I would have avoided doing so again, at the expense of an entire countryside. Felassan convinced me otherwise.
“Hope is no prey animal,” Solas said. “It can seem so fragile, and yet it will claw and fight for purchase in the world even when the odds are against it. Felassan is no different. If we had gone home to home, village to village, and stoked all the people to rebellion, it would simply have brought the goddesses’ wrath on them with terrible immediacy. Andruil loved nothing more than personally putting down insurrection—and hunting down fleeing prey, which likewise meant we could not hope to spirit away the entire population.
“So I fomented it anyway.” Solas seemed breathless. “I fed their discontent and encouraged their rebellion. They rose as one against the tyrants, and I left them to their certain deaths. They were one willing, bloody, country-wide distraction as I swept through their empty homes and stole their children away to safety.”
Ixchel knew then that she had the same knot in her throat, and she reached out to sooth his roving fingers, lacing her own through his. He squeezed her hand.
“And Felassan killed the beast,” she said.
“I am told that the people kept hope even as they were slaughtered to the one,” Solas said. “Perhaps some even saw it, the moment that the world shook and Andruil’s self-control slipped, and she turned her jaws of death upon her lover. Ghilan’nain fell a second time to a hunter—and this time, Andruil had no one to blame but herself.”
“What.”
Solas cleared his throat. “Another story you have probably heard a version of: Mythal had once excised madness from Andruil, but it was a part of her, and if allowed to go free, it would have returned to its original host. Mythal instead imprisoned it within Andruil’s Well and locked Andruil out of her own temple. Andruil did not mind; she spent her recovery with Ghilan’nain in their joint palace, and locked behind Mythal’s spells, the Well was safe. Or so she thought.
“But Mythal was not herself the architect of those spells,” Solas said, and a grim satisfaction did in fact begin to pour into his voice. “She had tasked one of her most loyal servants with ensuring her daughter’s sanity. She imbued that servant with her hope of a better future, for her daughter and for all. And yet that act did nothing to restrain Andruil’s cruelty from reaching the people. All it accomplished was taming her taste for familial blood.
“That same servant returned in secret, while Ghilan’nain and Andruil wrought unholy terror on their people as punishment for their insurrection. He undid the very spells he had once erected. He freed Andruil’s madness from her Well and sent it flying back to her across the countryside, and she succumbed instantly to unfettered bloodlust.”
Solas breathed unevenly, and his grip on Ixchel’s hands was hot and damp. For all he had mentioned that this story held no regrets, Ixchel could tell it was not free of conflicting emotion, or doubt. She was surprised, too, to hear something close to criticism in his tone when he spoke of Mythal—and after all this time speaking in fear-tinged whispers, it was strange to hear him speak of Andruil and Ghilan’nain in this way.
But she knew the story was not finished.
“There were consequences,” Solas affirmed, as if reading her mind. “Terrible, terrible consequences. Andruil’s addiction to red lyrium worsened, and Ghilan’nain then had direct access to the power of the Blight. Andruil’s violence grew exponentially, and I can trace a line from that moment to the moment Mythal was murdered. And yet—hundreds if not thousands of children lived, and lived free… and I had the chance to know them.”
Ixchel took a good look at his face. She expected the grief that she found there, and she would not have been surprised to see tears. But when she drank in the sight of his closed eyes and slightly upturned lips, she saw something else heartbreakingly familiar.
Love.
She wondered if that was the answer to the question she had not voiced while she watched him care for the infant Vira. She did not think the specifics mattered too much to bother asking. Or perhaps all of the specifics mattered too much, and it would be an impossible question to answer.
For the moment, Ixchel wrapped her arms around Solas, and he held her tightly in return, his face buried in her hair for a long while.
Her thoughts raced with all she had learned—of Arlathan, and the Evanuris, and Solas—and connections began to form between a world lost and unfamiliar, and the one she wearily walked today.
Celene was no Andruil, and yet… wasn’t she? And was Cassandra not in the belly of the beast at this very moment?
But Ixchel’s thoughts kept returning to that unasked question, which burned hotter and hotter in her chest.
She could imagine the answer.
“What happened to them?” she asked softly.
Solas’s throat tightened instantly with emotion.
“I do not know.” The words were torn out of him like paper shredding. “I have not brought myself to look. I am told many of our people sleep safely behind locked eluvians, awaiting a call to awaken. I am told many more have perished, some cursing my name. If I do not look… then there is no direct line between those children and…”
Ixchel nodded, burying her face in his shoulder. Words lodged in her throat, but mercifully these did not shake loose. In this moment, he had held on to something he had done—as bloody and painful as it had been, as much of a loss as it truly was—and could find something pure in it. She had been asking him to do just that for so long, and it had seemed impossible until this very moment.
This was stained with the unique grief of being helpless to stop an inarguable tragedy, but surely Solas could not argue with himself and the many good memories he had of those rescued children.
Children who had been his, for a time. His choice. A future he fought for.
Children he fought for, even now.
-:-:-
In her dreams, she was lost on a foggy road. In the distance she could see a light like the sun through a cloud, felt a familiar warmth. But as she ran toward Glory, she moved no closer. Glory said nothing to her across that distance, and yet Ixchel sensed an impatience emanating from the spirit—a demand.
She could not escape the fog. She could not close the space between them. She could not speak.
The fog consumed it all in suffocating silence until she drifted deeper into dreamless sleep.