it's just what happens when your heart goes ablaze
Leliana knows what it is like to feel pain.
She knows what it is like to nearly split apart with the raw edge of it. She has lived her entire life with some memory of it—some ache in her heart, stones in her chest. She remembers what it was like to watch as Dovev’s memories returned to him, as she watched him leave her for the past. She remembers what it was like for Vulgaris to drive him and their daughter from Loess in favor of his sister. Watching Dovev return and being asked, time and time again, to heal the ones who captured his heart. Watching as her husband’s memories were wiped and he was replaced with something cruel, something vicious and cold.
She knows the pain that radiates from Lepis and the echo of it reverberates throughout her.
“There is no magic that can heal this,” her voice is quiet, steady, despite the way that everything within her twists around her own pain, the shared pain, the ache at knowing someone else was feeling the same. “I could have saved myself so much heartache had there been a way to cure it.” Her lips barely quirk into a shadow of a smile, but it fades from her crimson mouth before it can take hold, before it can stay.
For a minute, she falls quiet.
The silence stretches between them and her hazel eyes go to the river, watching as it pounds against the riverbank. The roar of it is nearly enough to drown out the memories that rise in the back of her mind. The winter she lived here when Loess was no longer welcome to her. The day she passed out when healing Warrick proved too much and the chaos of Vulgaris and Dovev fighting above her. She frowns and then turns back to Lepis. “I gave birth to my second born here,” she smiles, choosing instead to think of the good that had come from her time here. “It was so cold, and she was too early. I was so worried for her.”
She wonders if she could continue. If she could tell her how that was the day she learned that some of the greatest joys in her life could come from her darkest hours, but such things feel trite. Because she knows the weight of pain and she knows that some of her darkest hours did not end with such joy.
Some hours were just dark.
Some things just hurt.
— Leliana —