They found Kieran with an old woman, a kind of intimidating old woman, if Holli were honest. Horns, or hair styled like horns? She wanted to touch, but she wasn't stupid enough to try.
Then when Morrigan uttered 'mother', both Holli and Hawke looked at her, eyes wide.
The old woman looked up at their approach, a smile spreading on her painted lips.
"Morrigan. Hawke," she greeted, amusement coating her tone.
"You know her?" Morrigan asked Hawke.
"We've met," he admitted. "Quite a little reunion we have going on here."
"So fun..." Holli muttered dryly.
The woman's eyes fixed on Holli, a gleam coming to the fore. Holli could see something very Morrigan in it.
This woman just chuckled, and Holli felt distinctly uncomfortable, like she'd been seen right through.
"Mother, daughter, grandson. It rather warms the heart, does it not?" The old woman said.
"Kieran is not your grandson. Let him go!" Morrigan demanded.
"As if I were holding the boy hostage. She's always been ungrateful, you see."
"Ungrateful? I know how you plan to extend your life, wicked crone!"
Holli tried to hold back the snicker. Wicked crone? Surely Morrigan had better insults than that in her repertoire.
"You will not have me, and you will not have my son!"
With a gesture, magic started gathering around her; Holli could feel it prickling her skin. She was going to fight her own mum?
"That's quite enough. You'll endanger the boy." The woman's voice had gone flat, hard, no trace of that levity from earlier.
Her eyes glowed a startling blue, and with a gesture, whatever spell Morrigan was conjuring backfired on her, sending her staggering back. Both Holli and Hawke flinched away.
"What have you done to me?"
"I have done nothing. You drank from the Well of your own volition."
Holli's jaw dropped. "Ooooo no way," she whispered.
Hawke looked down at her with wide eyes as well. Were they supposed to fight a goddess for the boy? And Morrigan had been so sure there was no Mythal, or that she was dead. Bet she regretted drinking from the Well now.
"Well, that was unexpected," Hawke mused.
"You of all people should expect the unexpected," Mythal said, looking between the pair of them.
"Wouldn't be the unexpected anymore then, would it." Holli muttered.
"But wouldn't your life be so much easier?"
The old woman patted the boy on the back, sending him off to his mother. Kieran ran to Morrigan, throwing himself in her arms, and she held him back just as tight. Well, all's well that ends well.
Though apparently not. Holli listened as Morrigan and Mythal, Flemeth, whatever, just dropped revelation after revelation. Jesus Christ, what the fuck were they even dealing with?
But then, once again, Morrigan was wrong. Apparently Flemeth/Mythal - Flemythal? Flemthal? – couldn't take her body without Morrigan's consent. Who would consent to that? And the old woman gave Morrigan her son back, but she did take something from him. Holli had no idea what. Shit just kept getting stranger and stranger in this place.
She looked at Cole, who had watched the entire thing in calm and silence. Once Flemeth left, they made their way back to the eluvian.
"Well, thanks for pulling me out of bed for this, Hawke; I had a wonderful time," she said dryly.
"It's about to get better," he said, nodding in the direction of the eluvian.
She looked ahead, and there was Riluan, looking much the same as he had the last time she'd seen him.
"Aw fuck off," she muttered.
Just seeing him made her stomach twist and bile rise in the back of her throat.
Morrigan's brows furrowed, but she seemed more interested in getting back through the mirror, and she passed Riluan with little more than a sidelong glance.
"Don't seal us in here," Hawke called after her.
"No promises," Morrigan replied, disappearing through it.
She watched Morrigan and Kieran disappear into the mirror. That left her with Hawke, Cole, and, unfortunately, the ghost of a man who apparently loved her so much he blew two worlds to hell over it.
Riluan stood there like a statue someone forgot to take down. Too tall. Too graceful for flannel. Still too calm for someone who'd ruined everything.
Her lip curled. "Want to rip this life from me too?"
"I never wanted to take anything from you, Holli."
His voice was soft. It made her teeth clench. She shoved her hands into the deep pockets of her coat, fingers curling into fists, just to stop herself from wrapping them around his damn throat. Not that it'd do much in the Fade. Still tempting.
"What do you want?" she snapped. "Usually when someone's dead, they don't get to keep bothering you."
Riluan's mouth curved with the barest hint of a smile, like her venom didn't cut as deep as she meant it to. "It doesn't work that way in Thedas."
"I don't know," Hawke said, scratching his neck and casting a sideways glance. "Seems to work that way for most people. I've never gotten to see my mother. Or my brother."
"Riluan isn't normal," Cole said quietly, almost gently. "Life and death don't work the same way. He gave most of his life to hers. That's why he can find her here."
Holli looked at Cole, that odd, tilted way she did when she was trying to figure him out again.
"And most people don't walk around in the Fade like we do," he added.
Riluan nodded, giving Cole a knowing, slightly too-serene look that made Holli want to claw his eyes out. Like they were on the same page in some book she couldn't read.
She narrowed her eyes. "What do you want?"
He met her gaze, and, fuck this guy, there was no defensiveness in it. Just that maddening quiet longing.
"To hear your voice," Riluan said. "Even if it is just swear words and insults." His smile tilted, something warm and mournful behind it. "To see that you're all right."
"Well, I'm super cool, thanks," she said, folding her arms. Her tone was pure acid. "Got shot with a couple of arrows a few weeks ago. I survived, and you didn't blow the world up. Noice. Go us."
Riluan didn't even flinch. He nodded like she'd just complimented his shoes. "Yes. We're doing very well."
She stared at him. The fucker meant it.
Holli's brows drew together, the corner of her mouth twitching with the weight of all the things she wasn't saying. Sarcasm was supposed to bite, or at least irritate. But Riluan just stood there, all calm and gentle and aggravatingly unburnable, like he'd built a shield out of her venom and wrapped himself in it like a damn blanket.
She turned slightly, half pacing, scuffing the toe of her boot across the strange non-floor beneath her.
"I was dead," she said flatly, eyes locked on the place where her boot met nothing. "I was born that way. Maybe that's how it was supposed to be."
Her voice wasn't loud, but it rang in the quiet like a confession.
"If I'd stayed gone… Candace would've still had you. She never would've spiralled. Wouldn't have gotten hooked. Wouldn't have spent years chasing whatever could make her forget. And fifteen years later, I wouldn't have been in a fucking shooting that resulted in us blowing up the Conclave and my school and—" Her voice cracked, just slightly. "—and killing hundreds of people."
Riluan was quiet for a breath. Then he just shrugged, hands slipping into the pockets of his jeans, like this was just another conversation. Like they were standing in a hallway, not inside the dream of a world that had already burned down once.
"Worth," he said.
That stopped her. She stared at him like he'd slapped her.
Worth? Right. Of course. He'd been in her world. He'd watched. He'd learnt. He probably said 'cool' and 'whatever' and 'samesies' now, too. Picked it up like a habit, trying to sound like someone real, someone normal.
"Not worth," she snapped. "You don't get to decide that."
"I already did," he said, voice infuriatingly calm.
Her hands clenched tighter in her pockets. Nails dug into her palms. "You decided, and now everyone's dead. My mum. My friends. My teachers. Everyone at the Conclave. You." Her voice dropped, like she hated giving him the word. "You decided, and everything that followed just—" She gestured vaguely, helplessly. "It all just collapsed."
Riluan tilted his head. "Not everything."
Holli turned and glared at him, arms crossed again like armour. Her mouth was set, her gaze daring him to keep talking. The dickead did.
"When Candace forgot you at the shop," he said softly, "and you tried to walk home by yourself. It was snowing hard."
She didn't respond, but her jaw clenched.
"You got lost," he went on, "buried in a drift by the old road. Frozen, lips blue. I couldn't reach you - not really - but I kept you as warm as I could. I led that man and his dog to find you."
"Fuck off," Holli said flatly. "You did not."
There was no heat in it. Just exhaustion and mistrust. Something older and more brittle than anger.
"I did," Riluan said. "There were other moments. Not many, I couldn't do much from here. But I tried."
He just stood there, hands in his jeans pockets, voice low and even.
"Every time you got back up when you shouldn't have," he said, "every time the world cracked and somehow didn't break you, I was watching. And I was proud."
Holli flinched like he'd struck her. Because that was the one thing she'd wanted, hadn't she? All those years, just to hear Candace say she was proud. And now here was this… man, this stranger, this mass-murdering, Fade-haunting, world-ending dead guy telling her the thing her mother never had.
She felt her eyes sting. Fuck this guy.
She turned hard and stalked toward the eluvian with sharp, angry steps.
"Go fuck a cactus," she muttered. "The next time you talk to me, you better be spitting prickles."
And she was gone, disappearing through the mirror. Cole lingered. He stood beside Riluan, looking in the direction she'd vanished.
"She doesn't hate you," Cole said gently. "She just doesn't know what to do with all the hurt."
Riluan didn't speak. Then Hawke strolled past, giving him a sideways grin as Cole followed Holli through the glass.
"At least she expects to talk to you again," he said.
Riluan gave a soft, quiet smile and said nothing at all.