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The prison was exactly as he had prepared it. Empty but for the echoes of what had been tried and those who had been failed. Reflections of the spirit within but shaped by his hand to call forth those who had fallen because of the prisoner’s actions.
He had expected Felassan. He deserved to see his once-lieutenant and friend. And there were whispers of his voice in the mists, joined by Varric. Yet he did not hear Mythal, the first of those he had failed.
Or.. was that because he had spoken to her again, the person she had been when he’d held her broken body, torn asunder by his dagger?
There were others, too. Rook. ‘And I believed you, fought for those moments of approval.’
They had not been false, but had been dripped out slowly, carefully, to achieve his purposes. Just as had his bits of information and approval to the Inquisitor, just as had…
Rook had escaped this desolate place, which meant escape was possible despite his best efforts. Another failure echoed through his mind. Or through the false air of his prison, perhaps, but it mattered not. He had not stalked her dreams to uncover how she had made her way free, which meant her path was not available. Besides, he’d entered of his own will.
In all his endless centuries of attempts and solutions and blood, he had never chosen a path of sacrifice. That had been left to followers or Mythal. He was the King who could not be lost. All other pieces were to be cherished, used, sacrificed. So he had lived in the times of the Evanuris.
… so he had chosen to live, since he awoke. Only to find that his choices led him here. It was not he who defeated Elgarn’nan in the end, nor Ghilan’nain. That was Rook and her companions. With his dagger, but with their efforts.
It wasn’t like he still had the connection to Rook’s mind - he’d abandoned that when he’d switched their places, too complacent in the end, too focused on the fight he had in front of them to risk distraction from her desperation and sorrow. But that led to another thought. He looked to his hands, still covered in blood too dark to be natural.
Most mages, even the more skilled blood mages, would only be able to access the shredded Hurlock, the remains of the enslaved dragon Lucasan. But he was the last of the first-born, and while blood magic was something he detested, it wasn’t something he lacked familiarity with.
There was the overwhelming sense of death, but the blood still had some vitality remaining. Solas fed that, carefully, as he searched for the thread of connection that must remain. Not to Elgarn’nan, who was also dead. No, he sought something deeper. Something so faint, most would not even detect it.
He, who knew the cause and had crafted the catalyst, knew where to look.
The corruption of the blood was not truly physical, though it had physical results. There lay the tiniest motes within of Blight - and within those, of red lyrium. The Blight was lyrium-transferred, metaphysical and voracious in its need to dig, to find, to drive away all on the surface and reclaim all below.
He had done that. None of the others had been able to find a solution that lacked the violence and death from Mythal’s killing of the first Titan, but he had. Little could harm them save their own essence… so he had used the one to sunder the rest.
That had ended the war, had given his people an endless supply of the raw stuff of creation to create their forms and live in the physical… and had sown the seeds of what became the Blight. Which had, in the end, taken the Veil to contain, until even that was not sufficient. It had, it seemed, never been sufficient.
Wasn’t that why he was here? Because in all this time, he had been playing the part of the creatures he had torn apart and driven mad?
**
Following the thread of lyrium led to a space of chaos and rage, desperation and aching loneliness. This was the red, the Blight - the link to the sundered mind and dreams of a Titan. Solas had hesitated before making that final touch, careful to limit the ability of the lyrium to spread in his body.
Another thing his fellows had used their enslaved dragons for. Those creatures, masters of the sky, had developed the ability to contain the madness of their terrestrial counterparts. Yet in his prison, he lacked any tools - no, any being - of such power. The connection glowed a virulent crimson in the grey nothingness of the world around him.
This was what Mythal had sacrificed herself to stop, when he had failed to seal it away.
Even as the thought came to him, he pushed it aside. True or not, it mattered little now. He set that regret aside with the aid of the fragment of Mythal he’d refused to face until he’d been given no choice and instead considered the throbbing hate and madness that swirled in his mind’s eye.
This Titan was not the one slaughtered, nor the one he had walked within a decade and more ago, fighting to keep his knowledge from poisoning those he had joined. Yet even in its forced tranquility, it had reached out to the Shaper they had come to aid. She had not become Blighted. Therefore, there was a means to reach it.
Or at least, a means to reach the sundered remnants in the physical. But he was no dwarf, limited by the same sundering. He was a somniari, of the firstborn, and knew what had been done.
Closing his eyes, he touched the lyrium crystal and listened.
**
There were few memories of the sundering - the whirlwind he entered was of trying to find that which was stolen. The world, the heartbeat, the beings that made up its flesh and mind. They did not answer, had not answered, no matter how it sang, until the song itself twisted and distorted in the echoing silence.
Cole had seen it, once. But there had been none other than he who could understand what Compassion experienced.
He lacked the power, in this place, to rejoin the mind of the Titan to its body. Or that was what he told himself, locked out of both the Fade and the physical in this prison, one designed to make the powers of the firstborn irrelevant. He could not command the Blight from this place, call to the Wardens who may have some means to reach another Titan’s heart.
Yet he had sworn to do what he could. This time, he had no interest in throwing up his hands and saying he had wrought too well before. So many untruths he had woven around the people of this time. The Inquisitor. The elves who followed his call until he sent them away so the ritual would not harm them. Rook. Thousands of others, yet it was those that echoed here. Felassan, killed for the crime of believing this era’s people were worthy of respect as equals, rather than pitied as shadows of what they could have been.
The Seekers had their rituals, ones he had read from their own tomes when Cassandra was not in Skyhold. The touch of a spirit of faith.
He had no such friends in this place that he could ask to reach out, nor had he the confidence that would work on the Titan, as compared to the person born and living when the physical and the Fade were kept so separate already.
But the creature’s loneliness called out to his own. That, he could understand, in a way. The Titan longed for its fellows as well as the dwarves that had been torn free of it. He longed for the spirit companions that had kept him company throughout the long dreaming and even his time woken and fighting to undo the harm he had caused this world. His last time in the prison, he had at least had the mind of Rook to touch and observe through, to shape within the Lighthouse’s special characteristics.
Now, he had none of those things. Only this one channel into a torn mind, warped from what it had once been. The violence and harm had always been possible, but prevented by the Titan’s understanding of self and the presence of its dwarves. Now, it was incalculable as the mind searched for the body that had once housed it.
What did he have in common with this thing of rock and resistance? It was magic and the antithesis of the Fade, even before he had fashioned his dagger and used it.
It was lonely. It called out, endlessly, for anything that it could speak to, touch, impact. It was angry, had stewed in the need for revenge for years that might as well be eternity to the short-lived of today. It had reached the point of believing that destruction of the creatures that traveled what had been its surface was the solution.
All this had been his creation. His ‘gift’ to the world he’d warped and limited.
Regret, pride, anger, envy - he took everything in him that could corrupt and set it aside as he reached for the mind, touched its outer edges. I am here.
**
Every time the Titan’s mind reached out for what he had taken from it, Solas left that one message. He was here. He, the one who had destroyed it and its brethren. He, who was the only one remaining who knew enough to reach back along that thin lyrium thread, who was close enough to what he had once been to leave the physical for what lay beyond.
Much of the time, Solas could not tell if it was to ease the Titan’s nightmares and the related expansion of the Blight poisoning Thedas, or if it was to give that madness a target and free him from the lonely prison he’d chosen to walk into. I have tried was a tempting lie to believe in, no matter that the sacrifice of death was not likely to be sufficient to accomplish what he had set out to do.
Then came the first time the Titan reached out with intent, rather than the desperate flailings of a caged beast. Caution. Solas sat, refusing to let his knowledge shape what the Titan was - or had become. He, Solas, was here.
He was not the people that had once lived as part of the Titan, had expressed its dreams, had helped to create and maintain the body that formed the world.
He was not the Evanuris that used the Blight to power magics otherwise unseen, through the physical rather than the Fade, with dragons as the channel and means.
He was only who he was. The man who had caused the wound, the spirit corrupted and chained by his own hand. Once, to the body he had taken for Mythal’s pleading to his pride. Twice, in having stepped into this prison.
But no matter what he tried, he could not communicate with the Titan. All he heard were distorted echoes of some kind.
Finally, it occurred to him. To have any way to accomplish what he had promised, he had to set aside his own certainty in what needed to be done and how.
Instead of attempting to communicate, he listened.
**
There was always a danger for a spirit, to listen to a single voice - especially one that had gone mad. But what else could he do? Give up? His pride would not allow that.
The song had whispers of almost-words in it, snatches of meaning just beyond his comprehension - but each time Solas realized he was trying to understand, he breathed deep and returned to listening. Such was the way of spirits; listen, observe - reflect.
Solas chose not to reflect the Titan’s madness back onto itself. Enough harm had already been done to the creature. But the longer he listened, the more he realized that the song through the Titan’s shattered dreams was incomplete. There were snatches of melody that shifted into a counterpoint, yet nothing was present to create the harmony.
The TItan seemed aware of him in some way, yet it had not grasped for him nor rejected him. He had not become the target of its rage, even if that would have been entirely justified. It might still change, Solas reminded himself, should he become more present to the mind and dreams he’d torn from the body.
And yet. He had sworn to do what he could to ease the Titans, to contain the Blight. Containment of the dreams themselves had not worked; instead, it had driven the Titans mad and produced a ready store of energy for Ghilan’nain and the others to warp.
He was not who the Titan sang to. They had never crossed paths before the firstborn used the Titans to create their flesh - and after, only to war with them, to mine their still-living bodies for lyrium and heartstones. The dwarves. It had always been the dwarves. The people his kind had seen as mindless and soulless, only appendages for the Titans. Their language crude, but able to be refined into what became elven.
Another thing his kind had stolen.
Regret, though, had no place in what he was attempting. He accepted his fault was shared, and set it aside for the moment. His prison held enough sorrows for eternity. Instead, he let the song wash over him, listening for anything approaching a pattern.
There was none that he could feel, but there was a sense of something deliberate. Something searching. Music had never been an art that drew him, but elven was lyrical enough, and it had come from the dwarves. There were points of similarity.
When the next empty feeling hit, he let his essence produce notes of its own, woven into the Titan’s nightmares. I am here.
The melody faltered, notes catching on themselves, the cadence stumbling. Caution. Shock. Need.
Need was dangerous. Despite the risk, Solas had made his decision and he committed to it. He continued what seemed to be harmonious rather than dissonant to what the melody might be. His own song stumbled, faint against the weight of the Titan, devoid of word or meaning. But it was there.
Slowly the Titan’s song returned and became urgent. Demanding. Desperate. He could not match that and did not try to, keeping to a simple set of notes, higher than the Titan’s. Slow. Basic.
Futile, a part of his mind whispered. Solas set it aside, focused on the harmonies. He had all the time in the world.
**
Point and counterpoint, melody and harmony.
Over time, the desperation of the Titan grew less. The loneliness did not.
Solas understood loneliness. How not? He had few that he was truly close to, and all of them, he failed. They lay dead and gone, and no few by his own hand. The Titan…
It reached for what it could not find. Its form, torn from it. Yet its form would not sing counterpoint, would not find harmonies.
That had been done by the dwarves, Solas realized. The very people he had dismissed as witless, soulless, incapable of being true people. They were the Titans’ dreams. They were as much a part of it as any piece of stone. Or had been.
The Titan longed for what would never be again. The dwarves were not that, save for some few that had remained near a living heart and had failed to develop language, a culture from their past and yet not the same as it.
Had he not done the same? All his efforts since waking, all to rebuild a world long since gone, no matter the cost to the people now? And yet.
Valta - he remembered Valta. Harding he had seen find a Titan through his dagger and her grief and rage, reflected in Rook’s memories.
Some of the dwarves would welcome a reconnection. Others… not. The world that had been was no longer. His efforts to remake the world he had thrived in had only led to death, destruction, and almost the loss of everything under the heel of Elgarn’nan and the madness of the Blight.
The Titan had reached out through the Blight to Elgarn’nan and Ghilan’nain, just as much as they had attempted to use it. The corruption, the destruction of those on the surface? That had been the Titan struggling to carry out what it needed to end the war, return the world to what it had been without realizing how much time had passed. The fate of the elves mattered not to it; why would it? They were interlopers, trespassers that had torn themselves from their natural state.
It could touch the Wardens, almost. The Joining was different, the Titan’s effects contained. But some could hear the song, fragmented in a thousand pieces in their blood and the blood of their companions.
The Templars. Yes, the Templars, some of them, could hear the Titan - but not comprehend it. The Titan was a tool to be used, not a being to respect. The song more than their minds could handle without feeding it memory, emotion - everything the Titan’s body sought but could not find. The Red Templars had heard more clearly, and corrupted for it.
Had he corrupted? Solas thought not, but could not be certain.
All that existed in this prison were his regrets and this one, thin connection to a creature wounded and unable to heal, its injuries long since festered.
I am here.
This Titan was aware of him, though not his history. He was not what it longed for or needed, but he was all that remained. Perhaps he could use the Titan to reach the Wardens, but what then? What new disaster would he evoke for doing so?
Instead, he sang with the Titan, without words… but not without meaning, Solas realized. There was an intelligence to the creature. IT was no mere beast of impulse and instinct. Witless?
No, nothing that had birthed the dwarves could be witless. Not when Solas had seen so many wonders created by them, even as they were hampered by the Blight, by the pieces of themselves he had taken from them. Nor were they soulless - they imagined, dreamed while waking, their hands carrying out the things that did not exist but could.
The song was thought. Was meaning. Was creation itself. No wonder the Blight had warped the dwarves, the very lyrium it could reach. It was the font, the wellspring of the physical.
It needed to create. To be.
I am here.
Then Solas opened his eyes and saw the pulsing crystal of rage and corruption was no longer crimson, but violet. He could not heal it, not truly…
But he did not need to. He looked at the endless grey of regret and saw potential, columns rising from the dead stone beneath him. Crystalline.
His prison held him, as he realized that he had never been controlled. Each moment of choice, each action that was ‘necessary,’ had been his decision. He could have refused. He had, and then claimed it all in the service of the friend he’d given control to, once.
I am here.
And for the first time, Solas did not regret the fact. He closed his eyes and returned to the Titan’s song. Perhaps together they could find its brethren, for it knew them and he knew what he had done to tear them from themselves.
The world would need them. The world as it was now, not as it had been.
Solas agreed.