Abelas
the Sentinel

Independent Dragon Age roleplay blog.

est. Jan 2015 !

prayers
swevenfox

Second speculation. Your thoughts of after the Well is "destroyed" how you would envasion Flemeth/Myhtal personal meeting with her loyal sentinel a bit later time (ignoring the cut scene of the game with Solas now). How would such situation go by?

You know what? I’m just going to make a very short drabble and combine pinkymorty’s request because I had already been thinking of this. Otherwise, I would have been describing the exact same scene!

Abelas' reaction to 'I should never have loved you.'

  There was a term, in the old tongue, for what he was now.  A lost and bygone soul, a forgotten and broken remnant of the ancient glory that lived on only in dreams and memory.  Like all that had passed into shadow, this word, too, was lost, and the once-Sentinel of Mythal had not even the comfort of a title nor an explanation to shape his being.

 He wandered this new world, a world which he scarcely recognized, and his spirits faded with each new ruin he discovered.  Old Elvhenan was dead, its spires jutting like bleached bones into the sky, and the first time he saw for himself what had truly become its legacy, he wanted to weep.

 He could not say what pressed him forward, what drove him through the corpse of the Empire-That-Was and beyond the hovels of the shemlen, their stunted cities belching acrid smoke in the sky.  These he gave a wide berth, and found little difficulty in doing so.  Not only was he some knife-ear — { the word foreign upon his tongue } but also an apostate, as though the natural order of magic were a crime to possess. He was a man out of time; this he knew, and thus his dogged determination to carry on could not be explained, not even by himself.

      Part of him wondered if it would feel like one last failure, were he to abandon hope— }

  He found himself, drawn more than s e e k i n g, to an emanation of power not unlike that which he had once served.  Time was meaningless to him now, and how long he had sought this font of energy he could not even guess.  What mattered only was that he had come upon it, desperate to glimpse, if he may, whether his kin cried out to him. Who could summon him hence, but an agent of Mythal herself? 

The moon was high. The waxing and gravid orb sat heavy in the deep velvet crush of night, a wan and pallid cast contouring the broken courtyards in stark relief against the ruined towers of the Elvhen stronghold.  Whether it had fallen to warfare or to the ravages of time, none yet living could say. It was a lost and forgotten place, and few animals tarried long beneath its shadow.  No browsing mammals rooted about in the long, tangled grasses, and no birds nestled into the multitudinous skeleton of crumbling towers, sensing the power that was woven into its very stones.

  { and yet there She was, a tall figure in the overgrown courtyard, as resplendent and proud as she had ever been, even in a place that had long since been claimed by the d e a d— } 

  Abelas’ heart leapt to his seizing throat, his breath catching, his lungs failing — surely he had fallen into eternal darkness, and now he walked the Beyond without so much as Falon’Din to guide him — the Friend of the Dead had abandoned his charges to the Void long ago.

  But the sight of Her stilled his heart, and brought clarity to his broken spirit.  Time and tradition once molded a young elven devotee into a cynical and wearied keeper.  Mythal the Protector demanded justice delivered with clear minds and open hearts, and these were precisely the qualities that Abelas has lost.  He had strayed so far from himself, embroiled in millennia of entropy, subsumed by the slow death of Elvhenan that time itself had decreed necessary to rip from him.  He had failed Mythal thrice over — when she had fallen, when he had lost himself to sorrows and bitterness, and when her final gift to the People had been taken from him.

  He saw Her now, and he knew Her, even though the form was different.  She turned, head swiveling towards him, and captured his gaze with her own.  She radiated power - and danger - as easily as she dispensed justice, her eyes bright with forgotten magics.  He came to himself again only when he was at her side, as though summoned in a trance.  Whether it was her mystical power or his own disbelief, Abelas himself could not say.

 M y t h a l looked at him, looked beyond his Vallaslin, ever regal and beyond the ken of Elvhen such as he.  Such was the nature of those with the power to become as gods.

  Something played in her eyes, twin whirlpools of molten gold.  He fell to his knees, his mind blank, disbelieving, unworthy of her.  That glint in her eyes sharpened into amusement, but also to something distinctly regretful.

  “Abelas.” She intoned, and how she knew the name he had taken for himself after her death, he could not even guess.  She was…different.  It was as though he was looking at the Protector’s reflection in a clear, deep pool, and reached one hand to disturb the water’s surface.  Whatever, whomever She was, he knew this was the ripple of that reflection.  This was, in some way, truly Mythal.

  Words were beyond him.  Thought was beyond him.  He felt only pain, a great, stabbing pain, clutch his heart.  Tears spilled from his eyes like diamonds, until her level stare stood even with him.  That Mythal should crouch for elvhen’alas, for one promised to her service — was madness to him. 

  “You are a lost one, Abelas.”  Her even gaze penetrated his withered soul, seeing in him everything that he could not bear to face himself.  “You have served for so long I do not think you know how to be anything else.” Cutting words, but not said unkindly.  It was an expression of the truth of his being, plucked from his mind as easily as the strings of a lyre.  The gravity of her interest in him was immense, a dark wave of emotion and disbelief washing over him.

  She sensed that too, of course, and she threw back her head and laughed, lunar hair white as the moon.  Her mirth was hollow.  Mythal cupped his cheek, as one would their beloved and dying dog.  “I should never have loved you.” She said, and the contrition was real.  It was no genuine affection, he knew.  It was not of Abelas she spoke, not entirely, but of the dreams she had.  He once helped fight for those dreams, for a shining empire, a Golden City, an ordered world without the petty infighting and squabbles of vain beings that thought themselves deities.  She loved these things and more, and Mythal had lost all that she had sought to protect.

 Mythal rose to her feet with deliberate slowness, and she comported herself with all of the dignity and grace he remembered.  She pulled back his cowl, eyes sad and sharp all at once —- and leaned in to kiss his brow.  “I release you, Abelas.  Find a new name, a new purpose, one of your making that is your own path to tread.  Until such a day, you are Suledin, and I hope you walk in light. Ar lasa mala revas. Dareth Shiral.  We shall not meet again."  

And like that, she was gone, leaving Suledin in the courtyard alone, wondering, hopeful.  It might have been a dream…
                            but for the memory of cool lips upon his brow.

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