"'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."

Callida smiles and nods.

"How were the previous archdemons handled?"

"With a huge war, usually."

"... Well, that makes sense, but I meant with the." Handwave. "The archdemon soul thing."

"Ah. Someone does exactly the thing I did, but they die."

"Ah."

"Yeah."

"Is there - some mechanism by which archdemons are born?"

"Supposedly, they're ancient gods that sleep beneath the world until the darkspawn find them and taint them and they wake up and start wreaking havoc. But I don't remember much about the gods in question. Dwarves don't go in for gods."

"Ancient gods," says Callida, "that sleep beneath the world." Pause. "For a god that was really underwhelming."

"I don't think you're supposed to be able to kill them as easily as we did."

"Oops," says Callida in a deadpan, not at all looking sorry.

He laughs.

Callida smiles. ... Then the smile falls.

"Though, admittedly, I don't believe I could save someone else from the archdemon soul transfer again."

"Well, it's not likely to come up for another hundred years, by which time it'll be someone else's problem, I assume."

"Hm. True. If I'm still alive for the next archdemon, I imagine by then I will have figured out a workaround."

"Seems plausible."

Another smile. Slightly smug, this time.

"Yes. Though I'll have more trouble with it if I don't figure out where I am and how to get home."

"Can't help you there. I mean, I know where you are, I just don't know where you started out or how you got here."

"... It's hard to explain where I was, even if what I said wasn't being mangled by a sub-par translator. I was attacked by something, it clipped my elbow, I showed up here. I'm not sure how that was accomplished besides the physical contact required."

"...Yeah, I got nothing."

"Yep. But I will not be the only one looking into it. My mentor will no doubt be trying to figure out where I disappeared to, and she has more resources at her disposal than I."