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There's a pain in her chest that threatens to gnaw its way to the fore. Genevieve feels a choking sob rear up in her throat--she can't swallow it any more than she can claw it out with her fingernails, but oh, how she longed to wail, to feel the hurt inflicted on her in its entirety, without censure. She'd give anything to be in the wilderness instead of caged as she is in this stone keep, secured at the very top, perhaps akin to the most perfect jewel at the crest of a crown. How she longs to howl and gnash her teeth and curse his name with only the halla as witness.
The chilly mountain air soaks its way into her bones, dressed as she is in an undershirt and loose, linen trousers. The cold of the stone stings her bare feet, but the sensation is peripheral to the pangs of air hunger shocking her lungs. She needs to breathe. In and out...but the breaths don't come, not without a rasping, sucking sound that only serves to bring prickling tears to her eyes.
She wants to be angry with Solas. He probably thinks she is--and she might prefer he believe it, but in truth she feels a numbness and darkness so akin to the terror of the Fade at Adamant that a part of her wonders if they ever really left.
A ferocious wind whips her hair from her face with such force that she almost loses her balance, but she steadies herself, noting the utter lack of fear in her gut standing so high off the ground. Perhaps the Nightmare demon had sapped any fear from her heart and left only the pain and the emptiness. The pain of loss.
She almost feels silly for this...the way she feels. Perhaps Solas was right, and this was for the better. She had become so swept up in the Inquisition--in protecting her people and the world from the Breach, letting her focus soften for want of him, to be near him, to speak with him.
She stares down at her left hand. She didn't ask for this! She shouldn't have let Justinia help her escape. Shouldn't have let Hawke sacrifice herself. Perhaps Genevieve belonged to the Fade, and that is why it called to her so adamantly. Wanted her to remain.
Inquisitor, he calls her now, when just a week before she held an identity all her own. Though perhaps that was the trouble with the hushed Elvish confessions, ardent as they were at the time...Solas christened her vhenan and thus had all the power to revoke the title. She stood alone in familiar isolation. The acceptance she had felt was water in her hands.
She looks down from her perch, absent of the vertigo that might otherwise have manifested. The pink of sunrise paints the Frostbacks in a hazy purple, and she considers her next course of action. Maybe if she had let the witch drink from the Well, it wouldn't feel like such a waste of her people's knowledge (hadn't Morrigan said as much?) if Genevieve took the step forward into the void. Something in the back of her mind stirs, a foreign voice growing more familiar by the day, but it speaks in an ancient dialect, too quickly, and then it's gone like the wind. It isn't enough to break her ruminations, but they have become a careful consideration, a deliberate meditation: what is the most advantageous next step?
A resolute calm washes over her as she looks down at the chessboard of the Inquisition--this is the endgame, she knows, and for once she not a piece but a player...if only for the moment. She'll surely lose her worth once Corypheus is felled, but it matters little. She will play the board before her.
Her dismount from the balcony's ledge is not graceful, but she's starting to breathe easier. She'll kill Corypheus. She'll return home. She'll become Keeper. She will die. She will feed the earth with her bones, and she will finally know peace.