Chapter Text
“You’re not a canary,” Anaris said, his long and mottled tail draped across the branches of multiple trees. A rather mighty weight to be hauling around all the time. Felassan couldn’t determine which snake species his tail resembled and the shifting mottled pattern helped little.
“Ahh!” Felassan said as though this were an old friend he hadn’t seen in centuries. “Hello, Bunny.”
Anaris stared at him.
“What the fuck did you call me?” Anaris demanded.
Felassan leaned against his staff, an easy smile on his lips. “This set is from that play, yes? Asha’mesalas.” The Lady of the Mire.
Anaris’ eyes narrowed. The evasion was elementary but the attention to detail in this set spoke of an appreciator of the theatric arts, so Felassan was willing to bet his boots that Anaris would let it slide since he hadn’t had anyone to talk to about this.
Well, he wasn’t wearing any footwear and he was rotten at bets, but point withstanding.
“I’m surprised you know of it,” Felassan said. “It hasn’t been shown since the second millennium. Not enough interest.”
He couldn’t recall the playwright or much of how the story went considering how long ago it had been. Then again, he couldn’t recall last month with any great clarity either. Memories closer to Tranquility had a haze to them not unlike this mist here. That was all he was, nowadays. Raindrops on the windowpane. A patchwork of fog and memories submerged and best left in the depths.
Anaris’ tail shifted across the branches. He slithered forward and emerged from the shadows but the mist and the dim backlights illuminated little regardless. His eyes remained the clearest feature. Bright green, the kind one would see when looking at sunlight through the underside of a leaf.
“All the stage plays were lost in a flood,” Anaris said. “Except one.”
“You have that stage play, I assume.”
“I don’t read.”
Felassan scrutinised him. A blatant lie, but if they grew less blatant down the line, he’d prefer to be able to watch for tells. He couldn’t with this lighting. Much of Anaris’ face remained difficult to grasp.
“It’s rather dark in here, wouldn’t you say?” Felassan said. “Let’s have a little more moonlight.”
He hit the end of his staff against the stage floor and multiple soft-edged lights shone from above in white to mimic the moonlight, piercing through the mist. Anaris hissed and shielded his eyes. The backlights shifted from steely to a dim blue evoking a clear night.
Felassan’s grip on the dream thrummed, like holding onto a rope being tugged from an unknown point. Anaris, likely. The tug was imprecise. More brute force than finesse. Perhaps the proximity to the Void had given him an edge, which was why Lavellan wouldn’t compete for control of his own dream. Faced with a trained Dreamer, however? Felassan did the equivalent of wrapping the rope around his hand and holding it firmly.
Anaris slowly lowered his hands and glared down at him, but it was possible that his narrowed eyes were still from the light. Felassan took pity and dimmed them a touch. Anaris retreated back into the shade of the oak tree, dappled shadows printing upon his face in speckles like the scales on his cheeks. His tail shifted. He eyed Felassan more warily, tongue flickering.
“I know you from somewhere,” Anaris said.
“Do you?”
He slithered down the tree and returned to the light. “You’re one of the Poodle’s little soldiers.”
Poodle? Ah, Solas.
Anaris’ eyes widened and he snapped his fingers. “Alhadar’shial. The Stag of Travel.”
Felassan straightened. He hadn’t heard that title in a while. It wasn’t always feasible to come in person and lead slaves to the sanctuary, so he’d instead send them dreams of a stag showing them the path to take. The stag had become a symbol of guidance. There had been attempts to strike parallels between Ghilan’nain and her halla, but Felassan had discouraged it. He’d simply wished to help show them the way. He’d had no desire to tie the Evanuris yet again into it.
Strange. He’d expected Anaris to be more familiar with the Slow Arrow, not the Stag.
“You’re Fen’Harel’s biggest dog,” Anaris spat
“I thought I was a stag. And little.”
Anaris bristled, his tail scales becoming keeled. Such hostility! Suppose simply the thought of anyone associated with Solas being in the same space as him was galling. Unless you were Lavellan, it seemed.
“Where’s the bird?” Anaris asked and flexed his fingers, the claws at the end of them deadly. His tail shifted behind him in hypnotic, winding motions.
Felassan slung his staff across his shoulders, both arms folded over it, and paced. He took in more of the stage design under the better lighting. The oak leaves were a little off. These were swamp oaks, dramatised to be more imposing, but the lobes of these leaves were too pronounced and lacked any dentate teeth.
“He caught on to you, I fear. Out there rescuing his poor lover.”
“Idiot,” hissed Anaris and slithered away. “Well, it’s been fun, Ferretface” — Ferret!? — “but I have a chicken to catch.”
Felassan conjured a stone prop that matched the style of the surrounding set and sat.
“I’ll be here, then,” said Felassan.
Anaris shot him a quizzical look, but Felassan didn’t stop him.
The moon rumbled across the stage above them.
“What the fuck did you do?” Anaris asked.
“I made a rock and I sat on it.”
He faced Felassan fully again and rose higher on his tail. “What the fuck did you do?”
Felassan eyed Anaris, his teeth bared, pretty face contorted into a furious displeasure, his entire body coiling back as though to lunge. He held his staff properly once more and rested its end on the ground.
“I have no wish to fight,” said Felassan. “Might we put away the hissing and fangs?”
A rattle assaulted his ears and Felassan winced. When rattlesnakes wished to be loud, they could be loud.
Anaris surged forward.
Felassan jabbed his staff. Anaris stopped short of the end smashing into his throat.
“If you kill me in this dream,” Felassan said evenly, “we will both be stuck with each other forever. You can’t pursue Mahanon either. The boundaries are locked.”
Anaris’ eyes widened, darting across Felassan’s face, but there was no falsity in his words.
The whole length of his tail turned spiky, the rattling grew deafening.
“You trapped me?” Anaris roared and reared back.
“Momentarily.”
Anaris opened his mouth unnaturally wide and hissed, fangs flashing. A cobra’s hood formed from nowhere and flared around his head, his large snake body coiling tighter on itself. Felassan stood and fixed his grip on his staff. He’d had little hope that Anaris would have been fine with this arrangement, and were the roles reversed, he doubted he’d be acting with much clemency either.
So, he braced himself.
Be swift, Lavellan.
Anaris lunged.
Lavellan stood on an island of corpses.
He’d thought it was land at first with a mound of corpses atop it, but no, the corpses had simply piled up high enough over the water to form islands.
He swallowed bile and took another tentative step forward, doing what he could to not step on a waxy bloated face while still keeping his balance. Some had their eyes open, lifeless and dull. Some had maggot-chewn cheeks. Most, if not all, were elves. A good number were in armour. Soldiers. Elves with vallaslin, elves without. Some were in simple, common garments. A tunic Lavellan would expect to find on a farmer, robes of an artisan, but there were also those in more decorated garments of nobility.
And outside of the corpses: grey waters, grey skies. Distant and jagged mountain ranges veiled by fog hugged the borders of the water opposite the horizon, indicating this body of water as a bay. But Lavellan was far from shore.
The prismatic thread trailed ahead, across the expanse of bodies.
Lavellan covered his nose, unsure if the tears pricking at his eyes was from the odour or the knowledge of what these bodies meant. Victims of the Veil’s creation. And this was not the only island. Many more dotted the bay.
He stepped forward but his boot sank into a dead soldier’s softened ribcage, straight into decomposed sludge. Lavellan cried out and tripped onto stiff and turgid bodies. He scrambled off, recoiling from the feel of slimy, cold skin. The bodies rocked in the water from his movement. Lavellan couldn’t even take deep breaths without gagging.
“Solas?” he called, his voice strangled.
No response.
He clambered over bodies. He tripped over a small shoe no longer than his palm and swallowed the sour acidity that lurched up his throat.
The prismatic thread continued over a small hill of bodies but dropped straight down at the bottom, slipping between the corpses beneath his feet. Lavellan looked skywards and wished he still had gods he could pray to for strength and mercy.
He got to work. Despite their decomposition, the bodies were still waterlogged. Moving them proved a challenge, and he hated touching the waxy film, hated the putrid scent, hated Daern’thal for conjuring such a twisted dream, hated the Forgotten, hated the Evanuris, hate, hate, hate, searing itself into the muscles between his ribs. And he hated his way through the task until he’d cleared all the bodies around the thread, only for it to lead straight down into grey waters.
Lavellan dipped a finger into it to test the temperature.
Icy terror stung him and he yanked his hand back. His heart raced. He put a hand to his chest and tried to take calming breaths and choked on the stench instead.
The grey surface rippled. The prismatic thread disappeared into its depths.
He hated this.
He braced himself and leapt into the water.
His muscles seized and tensed and he clawed back up instinctively, a storm of adrenaline surging through him. Terror gripped his heart with iron talons. Lavellan scrambled for the surface and hauled himself back onto the island of corpses, sobbing. His body trembled like a newborn foal.
How was he going to do this? How was he going to find Solas?
Warm tears carved down his chilly cheeks. Water dripped into the slack mouth of the dead woman he was leaning on.
It was the water. It was false fear. Was it false though? Maybe there was no clear cause but the dread in his veins and the drop in his stomach were real. His teeth chattered.
Be brave. Be brave.
He hummed his mother’s lullaby to himself, ignoring how his voice trembled. The Well of Sorrows rose in his head, filling his mind with a soothing choir of that lullaby.
Try again.
Lavellan sucked in a deep breath and plunged himself once more. The initial shock flooded his system but he forced himself to weather it, drawing on the mental fortitude training he’d done in Elvhenan under Thalamya’s scrutiny. They’d used enchantments to evoke fear in the trainees and they’d been made to do various cognitive and physical tasks through it.
What had their mantra been?
“Nas’ter; sil’vunelva,” the Well of Sorrows reminded. Stone heart; diamond will.
His throat seized, his heart pounded. He latched onto the lullaby repeating in his head.
Stone heart; diamond will.
He opened his eyes, his vision filled with grey and shadows in the water. More corpses… A whole forest of them. Lavellan forced himself to swim and pushed through his rebelling body.
The lack of visibility could be obscuring something, anything. There could be beasts in the water. Monsters. Horrors. Ghosts.
What if they surfaced and devoured him? What if they attacked? What if they chewed off his limbs? What if the damage they inflicted rendered him Tranquil? Cassandra had a cure, but what if the Forgotten’s interference made it permanent? Actually, maybe he wouldn’t be Tranquil at all. Maybe he would simply die again. Die an insignificant death, drowning like a dog, all the way out in some uncharted forest, and the Forgotten would succeed with whatever plan they had and the double Blights would wipe out everything—
Stop. Stone heart; diamond will. These thoughts weren’t his. The fear was not him. Stone and diamond.
He followed the thread, a single line of colour cutting through the grey.
Felassan’s emerald flames enveloped the stage, green embers flew with every swing and stab of his staff.
Anaris stayed low, the flames giving his eyes a vengeful glow. He dodged, he wove. His snake body undulated beneath Felassan’s feet, tripped him up, unsteadied him.
Still, Felassan pulled his punches. He didn’t want to grievously injure Anaris and trap them both, and he didn’t want to risk pissing Anaris off any more than he already had.
Anaris surged into his space and slashed his hands down.
Felassan leapt back.
Claws narrowly missed his face, sliced through a few strands of hair that had escaped from his braid. Sweat trickled down his temple.
A heavy weight (the tail?) whipped into his back.
Felassan jolted. Electric discomfort raced from spine to limbs. Rage flickered beneath his skin and smashed through the hazy film that frequently lingered about him still, a souvenir from Tranquility.
He roared and became more punishing with his swings and jabs. One connected with Anaris’ shoulder.
Anaris cried out and clasped his shoulder. His pupils thinned.
In a flash, all the coils scattered around Felassan closed in. Wrapping, constricting. Felassan swiftly brought his staff in. Pressure snapped around him, all the way up to his shoulders, that giant snake body crushing. His staff shaft dug into his ribs, the end of it eye-level. His arms and joints complained.
Anaris loomed above him, claws poised. He struck.
Felassan manifested a blade at the end of his staff. The point of it stopped just beneath the underside of Anaris’ jaw.
Anaris stilled, claws hovering above Felassan’s eyes.
The pressure stopped tightening.
The blade of his staff glinted from the fire, his and Anaris’ gazes locked in a mutual glower. Waves of discomfort pulsed from Felassan’s back.
Anaris hissed, fangs flashing.
Felassan snarled, teeth bared right back.
“Let,” Felassan said, voice low and steady, “go.”
“You first.” The coils shifted around Felassan but didn’t tighten further. Felassan took deep and measured breaths in. Tried to. A little suffocating in here.
“I have no wish to harm you,” he said in Elvish. “We have no need to fight.”
They stared at one another, the entire stage bathed in smoke and green and emerald embers. Anaris’ gaze darted across Felassan’s face as though rifling for the truth, but the truth was right here. He had no need to dig.
The pressure around Felassan tightened.
Well, he tried. Perhaps he was about to learn what ribs collapsing inwards felt like.
Rather than close in and turn him into a spray of entrails and viscera however, the tail loosened. More air flooded into Felassan’s strained lungs and he dropped to the stage in a mess of aching joints and strained muscles. Every breath hurt. He braced himself against his staff and kept his head bowed.
The pain accompanying every breath slowly eased and he straightened gradually. He shook off his limbs next and stretched them, and he doused the green flames surrounding them. The stage remained intact, but the mist didn’t set back in.
Heat still flickered in his chest, the skin of his back pulled too tight over his sinews. He ground his teeth.
Anaris turned and slithered back and forth, pulling at his hair, frenzied muttering beneath his breath. Felassan caught him saying dumb ferret and something about being trapped but the rest was lost to him. His cobra hood folded and melded back into skin.
Felassan’s tunic chafed against his shoulder blades. He flicked his shoulder the slightest and dislodged it.
If Anaris attacked again, Felassan must keep distance. His elven part attacked like a rogue, swift, assassin’s strikes. Hit and run. He could work with that. Such attackers did poorly being kept at a distance. The snake half, however? It lent Anaris more reach, speed, and stamina, but it was also a significant length. Some vines could trip Anaris up, hold him in place. Felassan could even weave between these trees and tangle him up.
His tunic stuck to the sweat along his lower back.
Felassan reached behind and peeled it away.
No, Anaris could scale the trees and gain the high ground. Felassan would waste precious time and focus changing the landscape.
The tunic plastered to his right shoulder blade.
He shifted.
Anaris’ tail pulled into tight bundles and Felassan gripped his staff harder, his hands’ usual tremors in the waking manifesting here too.
His tunic refused to dislodge. He flicked his shoulder sharply.
Was Anaris rearing back to strike? No, he’d gone still, save for his hands clutching at his hair.
The tunic wouldn’t fucking move.
Felassan sent a subtle gust of wind up his back, his poncho fluttering. His tunic peeled off his skin and his sweat cooled.
Anaris bundled himself even tighter, his muttering growing more frenzied. His claws dug into his own scalp. Felassan paused. He re-examined the tightly coiled tail, the unnatural stillness, the clutching and tearing at his hair. Stress responses in snakes, and stressed snakes were more prone to attack if handled incorrectly.
His wind abated, the tunic no longer sticking.
What could he say? Silence was likely golden. He didn’t know Anaris and so, Felassan was blind to what would calm him. But Anaris was certainly having quite the go at his own hair, no wonder it looked so messy. Come to think of it, beyond the serpentine qualities, nothing else marked Anaris as the 'dark god’ Elvhenan had claimed he was. With how they’d gone on, one would have expected the Forgotten to be draped in blood and leathers from the skin of the People, crowned by bone, reeking of sheer evil.
But Anaris was in nothing but a faded, tattered tunic that didn’t even fit him properly and hung off his frame like a sack. The moving mottling made it difficult to see but beneath the brighter lights, he could discern the patches of missing scales better. Concentrated around the hips. Places easy to reach.
Anaris scratched at his neck, his muttering growing softer. More scratch marks, though faded, littered his arms and shoulders, disappearing beneath his tunic.
Hair-pulling. Skin-scratching. Scale-picking.
Felassan stood in a particular way so his tunic wouldn’t make further contact with his back.
Anaris’ mutterings faded. His scratching ceased. The tight bundles of his tail relaxed and the scales smoothed over. He looked back at Felassan, the earlier agitation in his gaze gone, jarringly so, as though it had never been there. A strange glaze had set over Anaris’ eyes. Calm. Far too calm.
“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” Anaris said and faced him. “You trapped us in here forever on the whim of your new shadowy master?”
Whatever guarded tension Felassan had been harbouring shattered and all he could do was stare at Anaris in growing befuddlement. He burst out laughing before he could stop himself. Why wouldn’t he? How absurd a thought! In service to Dirthamen and his tenebrous decrees? Ah, but Anaris was souring and bristling all over again. Felassan raised his hands, his staff staying upright.
“I am not mocking you,” he said, and judging by Anaris’ eyes narrowing, Felassan had guessed correctly. “Fuck that guy!”
Anaris remained wary, eyes still narrowed.
“I don’t recommend it,” Anaris dryly replied after a moment. Felassan laughed anew, because what was this situation, truly? Never a boring moment in his long life.
Don’t mistake him for an ungrateful man, he truly did appreciate the assistance Dirthamen had lent them in the past, but his hatred of the Evanuris stood even if Dirthamen was the more tolerable of the lot. When he wasn’t in a mood. Therein lay the problem, still, did it not? Nobody should have had the power to impart misery upon thousands because of a bad mood. Right now, however, he was no god, he had no crown, no throne, and certainly had been a whole heck of a lot more proactive in assisting the city elves as compared to a certain gloomy someone.
A small voice whispered for compassion, for understanding, for faith restored in his old friend.
Felassan, however, had no interest in taking up the Dread Wolf’s mantle of sweeping aside hurts done to him because his friend was ‘having a rough time.’
“The Poodle, then?” Anaris pressed.
“He’s a fool, not a god.” Felassan grabbed his staff once more and leaned against it. “No, no, I’m in service to no gods. You know my words as truth. I have no reason to lie to you, anyhow. There’s no point.”
“And the Forgotten?” Anaris slithered once more, eyeing him. “Am I supposed to believe you don’t hold any animosity towards us?”
“Oh, I very much do. My hatred is alive and thriving for your little club as well, don’t you fret. I can hate simultaneously. I pride myself on my adaptability.” Felassan paced as well, keeping Anaris in the corner of his eye. “And we aren’t trapped here forever, so long as neither of us are fatally wounded. You’ll be free to go once someone wakes me. I trust we can both be civil until then.”
They circled each other, assessing, considering. Anaris at least looked more at ease than earlier, Felassan’s words ringing with truth. How fascinating that he trusted hatred more than reassurances.
“Your name?” Anaris asked.
“Felassan.”
“That’s a stupid name.”
“That hurts, Rissy.”
Anaris raised a brow and stopped slithering. “Rissy?”
“Hissy Rissy,” Felassan said, switching to Common. It was imperative for the rhyme. He grinned at Anaris’ put-upon look. “No takers? Ana Banana?”
“How about you shut the fuck up, Fel-ass-an?”
“Low-hanging fruit.”
Anaris’ scales bristled again and Felassan waved a placating hand.
“Alright, alright, we aren’t on a nickname-basis. I’ll drop the matter.”
The scales smoothed over again and Anaris’ shoulders relaxed. A begrudging air of calm settled between them and Felassan’s own tension seeped away, little by little.
“The air is cleared now, I hope?” Felassan asked.
Anaris grunted and waved a hand, slithering away. “I’m going over there. Away from you. Wait out this nightmare of a clusterfuck.”
He was rather irreverent and vulgar for a ‘godly’ figure, wasn’t he? Suppose Felassan had grown accustomed to stuffy gods and their High Speech. Were the rest of the Forgotten like him or was Anaris unique in that regard?
The moon continued arcing overhead, the mechanisms rumbling faintly.
A leaf fell from the oak tree above him and Felassan’s gaze followed its drifting descent to the floor. His lips pursed more and more. His grip on his staff tightened and loosened.
Anaris slithered further away.
“By the way,” Felassan called out, “your oak trees are wrong.”
Anaris spun towards him sharply. “They’re fucking what?”
Lavellan didn’t know how long he could keep holding his breath for or how long he’d been swimming for or how much distance he’d covered. Nothing but grey and bodies and the constant war between the induced fear and his own mental fortitude.
He swore he recognised some of these bodies.
He didn’t linger to check.
The prismatic thread floated ahead, his literal lifeline, its unerring glow preserving his sanity. Keep going. Be brave. Stone and diamond, stone and diamond—
Something grabbed his ankle.
Lavellan jolted and kicked out furiously, thrashing in the water. He looked down at the skeletal hand clasping it tight, but it had detached from the rest of the body. A final kick jostled it off and it sank into the depths below. He panted harshly.
Panted?
His mouth was open. He was breathing normally…
Dream logic, one he wasn’t about to question when it was serving as a boon. This way, he could take deep breaths now and better wrangle his body’s fear response.
He swam deeper down, pushed a few bodies out of the way, and reached a kelp forest. More bodies floated here, wrapped up in all the kelp akin to bundles of bodies he’d find encased in giant spider silk. Although, some weren’t held in place at all, simply floating amidst the columns of kelp.
Where the fuck was Solas?
A full-body shiver rattled his bones. Deep breaths. Stone and diamond.
He swam through the kelp, shuddering when a corpse would brush against him. The thread drifted lower. Light faded the deeper he went, his only source of illumination being the thread.
He swam.
What if he was going to be swimming forever? What if he was going in circles? What if he was stuck?
He swam.
What if it was futile? What if—
Stop.
The thread disappeared into one of the kelp bundles. Lavellan hurried and drifted to a stop in front of it. He grabbed and unwrapped the kelp, revealing Solas beneath, his eyes closed, as though he were another corpse in this ocean of death. Lavellan reached for him. His fingers grazed Solas’ cheek—
Screams fire smoke gore spirit body shred pain shards lungs steel blood screams screams screams screams—
Lavellan gasped and jerked his hand back. His lapse in focus invited the freezing terror back in and his muscles seized and his heart spasmed and for a moment, he truly believed he was going to die.
The Well of Sorrows blared discordant noise in his head and snapped him out of it.
He grabbed that fear by the throat and shoved it back down, wrangled his mind and body back under control. What the hell had that been? Flashes? Visions?
…Nightmares? Was Solas having a nightmare inside his nightmare? No wonder it took so much to wake him.
Lavellan had to get him out of here. He grabbed Solas, again and again, but each time, those haunting visions bombarded him. All at once. Every horrific memory twisted together into a contorted bastardised carcass. Being submerged in these waters might be worsening them.
Another shiver passed through him. Stone and diamond.
“Do not weep. You must be beyond fear.”
He pushed himself up on trembling knees and ignored the tears streaming down his cheeks, the snot dripping from his nose. The dagger shook in his hand. He didn’t dare let it go.
Lavellan held his head and shoved the memories down. He grabbed a stalk of kelp nearby and yanked at it. Maybe he could fashion a sling of sorts and transport Solas that way so physical contact could be avoided. The stalk wouldn’t snap, however. Any attempts to tear at it yielded nothing and he would only waste energy and time if he kept going. Not that way, then.
“Sathan, nuvenan mar halaniPlease, I need your help[1],” he said to the Well instead.
“Ma nuvenin.”
The Well surged and shrilled a disruptive song in his head. The shock of it offered enough distraction that he could push through the ocean’s effects and get a proper grip on Solas without being debilitated by the nightmarish flashes. Water against water. He unwrapped the rest of the kelp from the rest of Solas’ body, and revealed arms wrapped around him from behind. Lavellan paused and eyed the thick bundle of kelp behind Solas.
He unwrapped that bundle.
Black hair drifted in idle waves and framed a familiar face, bare of the golden vallaslin that had once marked it. Lavellan hadn’t seen this face in what felt like eternity. His face. His corpse, his old body, holding Solas lovingly from behind. The pair looked as though they belonged in a captivating but eerie painting, lovers even in death, frozen in their final moment of embrace.
Death would have to wait, however.
He shook his head and pulled Solas away from himself, his corpse, but the corpse held fast. Left with little choice, he grabbed Solas and dragged both up, the strain of the added weight slowing him down.
A flash of the nightmares broke through the Well’s defences for a moment. Lavellan yanked his hand back.
He shook it off and dragged Solas up again.
Again, again, again, the nightmares or fears broke through. Lavellan’s muscles kept locking. The weight didn’t help.
Lavellan’s kicks slowed and he gritted his teeth, keeping his gaze trained on the water’s surface, but it always appeared closer than it was. He kicked, kicked, kicked.
His grip slipped. He righted it. He swam.
He passed through a cluster of bodies and wasted even more energy pushing them aside.
His heart pounded. Running so fast he feared it would give on him.
Another body drifted above and Lavellan let go of Solas for a moment to push it aside—
Solas plummeted as though something had yanked him. Lavellan let out a soundless cry and dove for him, managing to grab his outstretched arm. Holy fuck, something was tugging!
His corpse snapped its head towards Lavellan, its milky yellow eyes glowing. Lavellan’s stomach dropped. It tightened its grip, fingers clawing into Solas’ tunic, and dragged him down, its strength surprising for its state. Lavellan gritted his teeth and kicked furiously, trying to keep Solas aloft.
Lavellan snarled and shoved his foot down onto his own face. Its head lurched back but it refused to let go.
He did it again and again and again.
The head snapped off from the neck. His own disembodied head sank into the darkness. He suppressed another shudder and kicked the rest of the body off Solas. Without the head, flesh sloughed off at the slightest force. Its legs tore at the ankles, then the knees, then at the hips. He wedged his foot between the body and Solas’ back and pried it off.
The torso severed from the shoulders and sank. Lavellan pulled Solas up and ripped off the arms still hanging off him. The fingers stayed caught in his tunic, fingerbones exposed. Lavellan tossed the arms and pried the fingers off.
He’d just mutilated and brutalised his own corpse.
Don’t think about it.
He wrapped his own arms around Solas, from the front this time, and prepared to swim up. Thank goodness he could breathe here. That struggle would have drowned him had this been ordinary water.
A shadow moved from the depths.
Terror flooded his body anew despite the Well’s efforts and his own mental fortification, the muscles in his legs stiffening.
A soft, sapphire glow brightened beneath him.
He looked down.
A large face peered from the darkness of the depths, that sapphire glow emitting from their eyes.
Lavellan froze.
They stared at each other. The water’s darkness undulated across their face, their haunting yet beautiful face, as though it were hair. All the corpses in the water had disappeared.
Lavellan held onto Solas tighter. The moment he did, a strong force propelled them up and threw them out of the water. He and Solas crashed into grey sand instead of bloated corpses. His limbs quivered and he gasped in breaths even if he’d been able to breathe in the water earlier, his body paralysed as the fear response peeled itself away from his nerves.
Solas’ prone form laid beside him, unmoving. Lavellan forced himself to sit up. The island of corpses were all gone, the bay empty save for the lone sandy island they’d been spat out onto, the distant mountain ranges on the far shore even foggier. What was going on? Who had that been? Fuck, had that been Daern’thal? He didn’t know, but he wasn’t sticking around to find out.
He rolled Solas onto his back, no longer barraged by the nightmarish visions, and shook him hard.
“Vhenan,” he said through chattering teeth. “Vhenan, wake up.”
He rested his ear on Solas’ chest and listened to his lungs, but there was no evidence of water being trapped within.
“Sorry,” he whispered and slapped Solas hard across the face.
Solas jerked awake and bolted upright with a harrowed gasp. Lavellan could sob in relief. He threw his arms around Solas tightly, trembling all over.
“Vhenan?” Solas asked weakly, returning the embrace.
“I’m here. I found you.”
Solas’ next exhale was shuddery and he buried his face into Lavellan’s shoulder, their knuckles whitening from their grip on each other’s shirts. The sand beneath them darkened from the water dripping off them. Lavellan probably had sand in his hair too, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care, he’d gotten Solas out.
Almost. Halfway out. Now they had to get out of this dream properly.
“How did you…?” Solas asked.
“Found you in the water and dragged you up.” His teeth was still chattering, but he pulled himself and Solas onto their feet. “We need to go. Find a way out of here.” Lavellan looked towards the shore. “We need to find the—”
The mountains were closer.
Lavellan stared. The rest of his words died on his tongue.
The heavy fog remained and lingered, obscuring the promontories, the only evidence of their existence being the jagged, craggy silhouettes visible through the haze.
The earth shook.
Lavellan staggered, his limbs still light and heavy all at once, and Solas caught him, though his own legs were unsteady. They kept each other upright instead.
One of the jagged peaks shuddered.
The mountain stood.
Higher, higher, the shadow rose, hulking, its true form mostly obscured, but the sheer scale of it made Lavellan feel like an ant. His stomach lurched. The air grew uncomfortably tepid, then arid, yet frost crawled across the water’s surface, spreading outwards from the shore.
And within the silhouette of that standing mountain, glowing orange eyes opened like twin, ruinous suns, looking right at them.
Lavellan’s face fell.
He shoved Solas behind him, standing between him and the towering shadow. This time, he couldn’t blame the tremble in his limbs or his madly racing heartbeat on the water. There was no doubt. None. This couldn’t be anybody else.
“Stay the fuck away from him, you decrepit spiky tortoise,” Lavellan snapped, which was not what he meant to say at all, oh fuck, oh shit, he was dead, they were dead, they were fucking dead. Solas made a strangled noise at the back of his throat that conveyed all the disagreement it needed to. Lavellan trembled harder, head to toe. “Touch him again and I’ll clobber you so hard I revert you back to a spirit, you giant bag of mouldy rocks!”
Solas grabbed his shoulders. “What are you doing?” he hissed.
He didn’t know. He didn’t know at all, his nerves were frayed, his teeth clacked so hard they were battling the rush of blood in his ears for loudest noise, and Geldauran was right there.
A low growl rattled the air. Lavellan mistook it for a rockslide first.
Geldauran leaned closer, faint impressions of his beastly face growing visible through the fog. His orange eyes narrowed and a grin split his maw, revealing rows of jagged, knife-sharp teeth. One of those would be enough to gore Lavellan into ribbons.
He spoke, his voice a deep and thunderous rumble.
“Wake up.”
Lavellan woke up though it felt more like his psyche had been thrown and smashed back into his body. The world spun. His stomach cramped, spasmed, and rolled with nausea. He sat up in a hurry, a hand over his mouth.
Dirthamen acted fast, threw aside the burnt herbs in the pot, and slid the pot over to him. He grabbed and retched into it. Strong echoes of the terror swept through his body vengefully and he retched again, bile and spit burning their way up his throat and dribbling into the pot. Solas’ shaky hands held his hair away. Dirthamen rubbed his back.
“Sorry,” Lavellan choked out. “Give me a mo—”
Another gag.
He breathed through it. His head pounded, sopping and oozing like rotten strawberries left out in the sun. Even if it had been a dream, that was the hardest he’d pushed himself in a while. He’d had battles more forgiving than that.
Dirthamen passed him a waterskin, which he gulped down gratefully. He wiped his mouth and grabbed Solas’ shoulder, taking him in, the exhaustion in his gaze, his pallor more evident with the soft morning light bleeding into the room.
“Are you alright?” he rasped.
“Are you?” Solas returned and held Lavellan’s face in both hands. Lavellan sagged into the warm touch and welcomed its life after being among the clammy, cold, and wet. His limbs shook, his nerves still jittery. Solas had been dealing with that for several nights in a row?
Lavellan held onto Solas’ hands, his eyes wide and teeth still chattering when he said, “Was that Geldauran?”
“Yes.”
“What?” Dirthamen asked.
“Did I just call Geldauran a decrepit, spiky tortoise?”
Solas’ face pinched. “Yes.”
“What?” Dirthamen asked, louder.
Lavellan made a shrill noise and bowed his head, holding onto his hair.
Well, shit.