"...All right, good to know," he says. "Where was I?"

"Your mother lived long enough to have you in an unlikely way...?" she prompts.

Also: shit, she thinks he just realized what happened with the other half of the dragon soul. Well. Nothing really to be done for it now.

"Yeah. And then it was me and my two brothers. Trian, my older brother, was an idiot. And not even a nice idiot. He was authoritarian and overly convinced of his own importance and competence. Bhelen, my younger brother, was smart but... reserved. I didn't spend much time with him as a kid. Maybe if I had, things would've turned out differently. Anyway, a little while ago I turned seventeen and there was a feast celebrating my coming of age, and that night I had a conversation with Bhelen in which I told him that I'd back him if he asked to be made Father's heir and he told me that he thought Trian might be plotting against me. When we went out the next morning for my first mission into the Deep Roads as a commander, I found Trian dead at a crossroads and Bhelen came running out of a side tunnel with Father in tow, crying about how they were too late to stop me. He'd even bribed the people under my command to claim they'd seen me kill Trian, just to make sure. Very thorough, is Bhelen."

"... You said you'd support him and he betrayed you anyway?" she asks, after a pause to get the mangled translation from her comm.

"Yes. That is exactly what happened."

"Why?"

"Honestly? He's not great at thinking on his feet and that plot has to have taken a lot of advance preparation. If I'd made the suggestion two weeks earlier, Trian might still be alive."

"Ah. That - helps a little, I suppose."

Stalas shrugs. "So, they had me exiled to the Deep Roads, which is effectively a death sentence. I've been doing a lot better than they meant me to, but I didn't expect to hold out against the darkspawn forever."

Nod.

"For lack of anything better to do, I decided to go looking for an expedition that went out in search of an ancient artifact two years ago and never returned. I found what was left of them, just short of their goal, and closed the last of the distance myself, and there I found Caridin, the smith who created the artifact. Legend said the Anvil of the Void could bring the semblance of life to stone or metal and create warriors who would never tire or feel pain. Legend left out the part where in order to make a golem you need to kill a dwarf and put their - soul, I guess - into the golem's body. At first it was all volunteers, then they got desperate, then Caridin complained and his king had him made into a golem, then he sat in a cave for a thousand years contemplating his regrets."

Caridin makes a metallic sound that might be his equivalent of an amused snort.

"I... see," says Callida, frowning.

"Mm?"

"I am imagining the implications of nonconsensual soul transfer via murder, and they are unpleasant."

"Yes," Stalas agrees. "Originally, Caridin planned to wait around guarding the Anvil forever so no one could use it, and if he ever convinced someone to destroy it for him - he couldn't, it was impossible for a golem to try to damage it directly - then he was going to kill himself. Well, I destroyed the Anvil, and then I pointed out that he can do everyone a lot more good in Orzammar than he can from the bottom of a lava pit."

"Very eloquently, too," says Caridin.

"Can he get your exile ended?"

"Ending my exile is definitely something that's going to happen," says Stalas. "I haven't decided exactly how."

Nod.

"And the armor is... To guarantee getting back to Orzammar?"

"It'll help, definitely. But also, I'm planning to disguise myself as a golem so I don't get turned away at the gate. 'The Paragon Caridin and retinue' sounds a lot nicer than an exiled kinslayer."

"Ah. Yes, that makes sense." Pause. "And how do I fit into this narrative, besides terribly from a storytelling standpoint?"

"My original plan also didn't account for killing an archdemon. I'm thinking I'll haul its head back to Orzammar - both of them - and incorporate that episode into the official version of what happened down here. People have a right to know an archdemon has died."

"'An'? How many archdemons are there?"

"One at a time, usually at least a century apart, but when one shows up it's very bad news."

"Oh." She relaxes a little. She does not have to figure out how to desoul another archdemon. Good, good. Because she can't exactly put another soul half in herself unless she wants to go crazy. "All right."

"Normally the darkspawn are disorganized and stupid and not much of a threat to anyone aboveground, it's just us dwarves who have to deal with them all the time. When an archdemon comes along and makes them into a real army and tries to kill everyone with them, that's called a Blight. This will have been the shortest one in history."