The Herald and The Apostate

XI

Maeve had been carefully hiding clues for him all week. 

It's killing him slowly.  

She refuses to let him touch her until he finds the last clue, no matter how much she may want him to.  "You best hurry up and find that clue."  She whispered to him in the early hours of the morning.  "I'm getting restless with all these unproductive mornings, Solas."  She got out of bed then, leaving him with the memory of her body pressed tightly to his.  

Watching her bring the baby out of the nursery made all of it fall away, of course.  Nicolynn was teary eyed and crying as was her normal wake up routine.  Finding herself in any place other than the arms of her mother is starling for the child.  He took the baby from Maeve's arms and spun her around with glee. 

That look on her face, the laugh on her little baby lips was more than enough to get him through the day.  "That's better, Da'len."  

But now, now he must finish the task Maeve set before him.  Find the last clue.

And be granted access to that paradise she has so mercilessly denied him.  

The first one had been simple.  A riddle of sorts that he had been following for a week.  "You enter where I close.  Find me in the place where rest and wakeness meet their end."  She had made the first one easy on purpose.

He found the note tucked under their mattress. 

"Seek me where you slid within the first time after Nicolynn." 

He thought it slightly odd that she would include their daughter in this game of hers but Solas wouldn't deny the grin on his face at reading the words, remembering their time in the closet. 

"I scream for you.  Find me where no one will hear us." 

That one had been trickier. 

Skyhold's walls, while sturdy and stony, are not sound proof.  In fact, nearly every noise they make is given back tenfold.

It wasn't until he found her in the Undercroft, working on a new axe pommel, that he realized where it was hidden. 

The roaring of the waterfall behind her brought it to his attention, reminding him if their time in the throes of passion behind the falls of Crestwood.  And on the shore.  And in the water.  On the rocks.  In the grass.  Against a tree. 

No one had heard a sound. 

Not one of her moans, or mewls, or or screams, or pleas left that steamy alcove. 

How she had found the time to hide it there, he doesn't know.  Perhaps her trip to the Storm Coast a month ago had allotted her the chance. 

But had she truly been plotting this for so long?

When he got to the falls, he found the clue beneath the rock they'd carved their names into what felt like so long ago.  "Don't stop.  Take me and don't ever stop, Vhenan.  What else don't you stop for?" 

He feels the ache in him at the remembrance of this particular clue.  With as much time that's passed since he got to touch her, feel her, his restraint is painful.

"What else don't you stop for?"  It had taken him hours to figure it out.  He ran through all the times she had cried in his ear not to stop, not to slow. 

Every time her voice was a song.  And he didn't.  He didn't stop.  He kept giving it to her.  Kept pounding into her hot, wet heat, that treasure between her legs. 

The only thing that he could think of that he had stopped for was while she carried his child.  And even then it had been a difficult task keeping his hands off her.