Chapter Text
Solas had failed. At everything.
He released the Evanuris to help him remove the Veil, but all of them had failed. And though he was determined to find another way to save the elves, he never discovered how.
So the elvhen went their separate ways, and Solas fell into obscurity. The Veil grew thicker as the years went by, and magic disappeared from the world. And saddest of all, the elves went extinct. His greatest fear, realized.
Solas was now one of the only remaining elves in an exclusively human world, and he had to hide his pointed ears with what limited magic he could still conjure. This he came to accept, but what he hadn’t anticipated was as the Veil thickened, Thedas began to change in ways he never expected.
It became like her world. Anna’s world.
Castles became skyscrapers, carriages evolved into cars, and soon he was living in a world with television and the Internet and everything else that she had described to him. It was a marvel what people could achieve when magic was no longer the answer, and blights and demons were no longer threats.
Solas had never forgotten Anna. The strange spirit from another realm whom he had fallen in love with. She died, all those years ago, when he had awoken the Evanuris. It’d been centuries since then. Almost seven hundred years. He missed her at times, though he had to continue on.
As years passed, Solas obfuscated his true identity as best as he could, mixing and morphing recollections of history until Fen’Harel became nothing but a scattering of fractured legends. With this, he was easily able to hide his identity, and Solas explored the world in ways he had never allowed himself before. He learned different trades, traveled to new countries, and studied the world as it changed before him.
But as the humans became the only remaining race, Solas realized how much it pained him for the People to be slowly forgotten. Because it was his fault. So he became a professor of elven history. It was easy for him, as he had lived through all of it. He even published some texts on their history, though always carefully omitted anything about Fen’Harel unless necessary.
Life passed by in a peaceful manner once he started teaching. He enjoyed imparting knowledge to willing students, who would even occasionally inspire him in return with their curious questions. Unfortunately, though, ancient elven history was losing popularity, and he had to begin to teach some other periods as well. He chose the Dragon Age, because that was the one he felt most important to get right—for all the wrong he’d done in it.
This all occurred without incident until a game called Dragon Age: Origins came out, reviving interest in the time period. The video game was based on historical events, though much of it was fictionalized. Solas did humor himself by playing it, and he found it quite interesting how several details of that time were correct. Even including some small mentions of Fen’Harel, which concerned him. But later, when Dragon Age 2 was released, he didn’t think he had much to worry about, as it was too absurd to connect Solas to a figure that was buried in the codices of a game. (Though he noticed how much Flemeth was a part of these games. He thought to ask Mythal about it, but did not want to disturb her. She could be touchy about the way history presented her at times.)
And then Dragon Age: Inquisition was announced, and Solas would be one of its characters. Fen’Harel was only a vague mystery in the first two games, but to now have himself as a playable companion… That was unsettling, to say the least. He wondered if he needed to change his name again, which he did every fifty years or so to avoid suspicion. It was currently Solas Harel, a name he had chosen ironically a few decades ago. Would anyone discover his true identity with such an obvious similarity?
He decided to focus on his work instead. Though the games were popular, their audience was still a small subset of the general population, and anyone who met him would believe it to be a simple coincidence. He had learned how beneficial it was for his mental state if he concentrated on shaping the young minds who entered his classroom. They were the future, and though he could not give them back their magic again, he could at least give them their history. The true history—minus the parts with Fen’Harel.