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I respect you, Solas says.
What he means is I fear you.
Reshlyth Lavellan is blessed with the most preposterously bad luck he has ever been witness to. To be in a place to interfere so disastrously with a plot that had nothing to do with her. To be at the Conclave at all. To have been thrust into a place of authority with no warning and little preparation.
And now here she is. Perched on a throne that should seem too large for her.
In her black eyes burns a strange flame, and Solas knows enough to feel afraid.
He was never the sort to go against an opponent directly.
The games he plays are all long, and he is patient. He answers her questions. Tries to remember to be kind.
But behind her she carries the echoes of her people—her sad, shattered people, dragging tatters and scraps forward with them into an Age that does not want them there. There are moments when she looks at him and he sees the hard eyes of a clan rejecting his offer of help.
And he is beside her when they walk through the Exalted Plains. She stops at the base of a statue, looking up. He’s the only one close enough to hear her murmur.
They put up monuments to the slaughter of children.
That’s the moment the wind shifts. There is a sudden charnel reek; pits of rotten corpses are burning to the east and the west. Solas doesn’t think that smell is all physical.
Sometimes, the future approaching smells of a battlefield, of smoke and death.
Reshlyth builds an army as one of the stone children might build a fortress—soldier by soldier, cementing them in with religious fervor and obligation and gratitude. She walks through Skyhold in the evenings, a hood hiding her hair and ears. Listening. Observing.
Sometimes he joins her.
“What will you do, afterwards?” he asks as they walk one bitterly cold night.
Her answer is just a soft, strange smile. She turns away.
In another age, she would have been one of his.
When he first meets her, he thinks she is just another slow arrow, fired from an unknown bow into the precise chaos of the future. He saves her life, because he is curious. Because he thinks she will be useful.
But now—
She has walked into the Fade, and out of it. Twice. She is something other than mortal now.
Sometimes the dagger turns in the careless hand. Sometimes the ground shifts beneath the arrow’s flight. Sometimes the woman you save because she might have a use to you turns out to be a player of your own games, and sometimes she realizes who her opponent truly is.
Solas can see it in her smile. He can feel it in the schemes she sets in motion, how she guides the people around her. He knows it when their eyes meet. These are new steps in a dance that was ancient when the first of the Old Gods were hatched.
I respect you, he says.
What he means is, you will burn the world and dance on the ashes, for vengeance.