You could be happy; I hope you are, Leliana

[leliana]

I rise from my scars. nothing hurts me now.

When she left Loess that day, she did not expect for Tephra to call her home.

She did not expect for the pieces of her to click into place—for the impact of the last few months and years to swing at her with its gravity, knocking so much of her heart back into its new place. Its wrong place. The memory of his attack on her, of him leading her into captivity, into the leadership of Loess—all of them, they are all culpable in her mind—flares in her breast. It burns like a star; she cannot ignore it.

She cannot ignore the overwhelming fury that burns like justice.

She cannot ignore the need to protect the weak, to topple the cruel from their positions of power.

It is a foreign desire—nothing like the kind, calm healer of her past—and yet it feels perfectly in place within her. She does not question the way it sets like a stone or the way that she grips her fist around the calling. She doesn’t question how easily Magnus had agreed once she had talked with him; how much he had understood, his own golden eyes flaring with fury and that locked away blood thirst.

She doesn’t even question that she now sits with one of Beqanna’s four crowns atop her brow.

(She never wanted this, never wanted power, and yet it suits her well.)

All of it makes sense. This rushing river of destiny that carves out new shores, flooding her veins with a magic she doesn’t understand, washing away the rest of her. It leaves no imprint on her heart—gives nothing for the fingerprints of her family to hold onto. It becomes clinical in her mind, and although she cares for them—it is the way the sun may care for the plants that blossom. It is not enough to bring her down to earth any longer. It is not enough to keep her shackled and bound and mute.

She stands amongst her home, her kingdom, when she feels him cross the border. She feels the exhaustion in his limbs and desperation in his heart, and she angles her head in thought. When he rushes to her side, pressing flesh to scales, there is a piece of her—buried so deep within her—that nearly shakes loose. It vibrates in response—an alien fear and an unquenchable hunger for more melding into one powerful roar.

But it cannot stand against the rest of her.

So while she hesitates for a second, stands still so that he might bury his head in her mane, might recreate this moment, she does not reciprocate. She merely absorbs it, burning all the brighter for it.

“I can’t pretend that nothing has changed,” her voice a whisper, a kindness—the only type that she can give him now. “You love a ghost.” He loves a girl that pressed quietly into his chest. A girl that cried into his neck. A girl that loved him when he drove her out of their—his—home. A girl that loved him even when she knew that he loved another. A girl that loved him even when his love left scars on her wings.

A girl that loved him enough to let him lead her and her children into captivity.

But she isn’t that girl any longer and she doesn’t bend now; she couldn’t even if she tried.  

“You can stay here with me, as I am,” her voice echoes in her mouth, and those secret chambers of her hope he will—want to beg him to accept. Want to claim him and hold him close. Hoard these reminders of herself. Her golden eyes flare radiant as they find his own, the solemn lines of her lovely face carved as if from the volcanic rock that rests behind her now. “You can stand with me against Loess.”

@[vulgaris]