Inhibited, Exhilarated

Epilogue

To wake up and the first thing you're aware of is an overwhelming sense of happiness and love in your heart is quite a new notion for Ellana. It swells her chest, warms her cheeks and makes her smile. Solas says he likes to see her blushing. She says she's too old to feel like a teenager again. He usually doesn't agree and kisses her anyway. She likes that.

It's been a few weekends of bliss in between weeks of arduous work. Solas' replacement, Mr. Ruel Pawells, has been reorganizing Wellsprings' managing, or rather, unmaking some of Solas' projects for the sake of saving money and prioritizing. She thinks the man has no idea what he's doing, but, regardless, her job is to be the executive assistant to Wellsprings' CEO and Mr. Pawells is the new guy filling in that role. And so she endures from Monday to Friday, keeping her opinions to herself and doing what she's told. And counting the hours to go to Solas on Friday evening. His place has a growing collection of her belongings scattered here and there. He jokes that she's slowly taking over his apartment. She retorts that his place happens to be bigger than hers, so she camps at his, and judging by how long it takes for them to say goodbye on Sunday evening, he seems to love the idea.

He likes to paint, Ellana had no idea he was an artist. There are canvases of different sizes and in different stages of completion in a room that she believes was originally built to be a studio or a baby's room. That place holds a plethora of paint tubes, bottles of stinky liquids she knows nothing about, a bunch of brushes from the thinnest to the thickest ones, stained, wrinkly cloths hanging from the easel and more empty canvases waiting for their turn to hold his vision. It's beautiful to see him work on his art. He says he hadn't painted in years due to lack of free time, but now that he does, he's back at it with fresh ideas. The third weekend she spent at his, she believed she recognized a female figure in his current work in progress that resembles her a lot. It may be her imagination or wishful thinking, but it's the figure's wavy long hair flowing in the direction of a west wind and the way a masculine-looking hand holds hers that makes her believe it's them. Solas is painting them together.

He seems relaxed like she has never seen him before. He says he's in no hurry to find a new job and assures her he always had a contingency plan in the form of savings and some money invested in hedge funds. Solas says he always knew he'd be fired eventually and that his magic would be to blame. He knew this would happen because he claims he was never going to keep it up indefinitely. And now that he's free from his self-imposed control and societal expectations, it's like he's a dozen years younger. She's still unsure how old he is exactly. His home tells of several companies he worked for before Wellsprings, each of them for years at a time. There are titles and scrolls in his bookshelf whose language she can't even read. Old Elvhen? She's realized he speaks Elvhen more fluently than what he usually lets on, she's even found notebooks written in his elegant longhand that's clearly Elvhen as well. The first time he called her "vhenan" back in that Trade Fair weekend in Val Royeaux, she should have guessed it's more than a special interest of his; it's a second language. He says he's picked it up by commuting with spirits in the Fade and by exploring old memories of the long lost empire of Elvhenan. Sometimes Ellana looks at him while he's engrossed in painting, reading, or cooking, and wonders who he truly is. For all she knows, he's a time traveler or someone born in the wrong age. All she knows is that she loves him.

This is the first weekend she spends at his place in the woods. She had no idea Solas had a place in the middle of the forest. A cabin he said he bought a long while ago for a bargain, because the previous owner was itching to get rid of it. Solas says he's been investing money and time rebuilding, upgrading and improving it to make it a livable space for the few times he can escape here, away from the city. So she's brought a small suitcase with her things and another bag with some essentials, and has officially taken possession of yet another one of his places.