Chapter Text
The weight of millennia had lifted from his shoulders, but one could not tell from looking at his form. After all, he had carried it all with no hint to his posture, his back and shoulders always strong and as straight as a hunter's taut bow, as if pride itself was pulling the string. Back at Skyhold, one had to look at his eyes or listen for the slight tremolo that sometimes accompanied his words to catch glimpses of the pain, and even then, they were but faint echoes of the turmoil within. Since Solas did his utmost to appear unassuming, most people did not notice.
They had crossed the threshold together, but she trailed a step behind and he had not been facing her, fearing that should he turn around she would simply vanish. He was convinced she would dematerialize and reveal herself as either a trick of his mind or an illusion, one last manipulative scheme from Mythal. Even worse, surely a glimpse of the desperation now filling his eyes would stop her right in her steps, retracting of her own volition in a sudden flash of reason. Surely, the forgiveness she had extended to him while he stood wounded in defeat amounted to nothing more than words, born out of pity or crafted to manipulate him into tying himself to the Veil alone. She would remain in Thedas, sighing in relief at the idea of never having to suffer him invading her dreams or being tempted to trespass into his again, while he would spend eternity alone to atone in grief, as was the extent of what he had always believed to deserve.
As the two worlds Solas had birthed ages ago intersected in the space around them, both him and Ellana sensed the familiar tingle of stepping into the Fade in their physical form. And Ellana’s hand, flesh born of cursed flesh and ruinous warmth, still rested on Solas’s back.
She was close enough for his towering form to almost fill her vision, apart from the blurred ghosts of her being reflected in crystalline shapes moving around them. The Fade was reacting strangely to their arrival.
Ellana held back any urge to deepen the touch, to jump into an embrace, the one she had dreamed of for the last 8 years. He would still not face her. Have I intruded here, Ellana wondered. She turned around and, for a brief moment, just as the last cracks of the rift mended behind them it was Ellana’s stomach that felt cleaved by a sudden pit, while the thought of everything she had left behind and the fear of having forced herself onto someone’s eternity deafened her reason.
Then, a whimper broke the deafening silence.