Pause for translator, brief moment parsing all of that so it makes sense, then: nod.

"Right, so. There's an unofficial tradition of casteless women pursuing the opportunity to bear a noble's son. It's a hard opportunity to come by, so most of the successes have money behind them; and it's impossible to get money behind you as one of the casteless unless you're a criminal or involved with criminals, so there's some infighting and it can get pretty brutal, competing interests trying to ensure that their noble hunter will be successful and they'll get to pretend to be her uncle, or whatever, on her way up. My mother was a noble hunter, and one of her sponsor's rivals had her poisoned when she got pregnant, and she tried some unlikely things in an effort to survive long enough to have me. I lived, she didn't. This is the explanation for why I was glowing blue when you first saw me."

... Okay, her slightly shitty translator is having trouble with that. But she got most of it, so after a pause to shake down her translator for extra potential words, she's got most of it.

"What unlikely thing caused the blue glow?" she wonders.

"Lyrium." He catches that her translator chokes on that one, and adds, "It's a magical substance. Deadly toxic, most of the time. Dwarves are resistant but it can kill even us at a high enough dose."

"Ah," says Callida. She - doesn't ask about the wisdom of taking a deadly toxic substance while pregnant in order to live long enough. Her translator might just burst into flames on the spot.

"It hasn't been kind to me. I'm too skinny and I bruise like an overripe fruit. Also I glow. But I'm alive, which I wouldn't be if she hadn't tried it."

"Does the glowing... do anything?"

"I don't need to eat, drink, or sleep as long as I can breathe lyrium fumes regularly. When I've had a breath of lyrium recently, I glow."

"Oh. Convenient."

"I agree."

"I can avoid eating, drinking, and sleeping if I," the translator does not have the word for meditate, she pauses. "... sit still for a while and focus. Magic thing."

"I shouldn't still be glowing, though, and I shouldn't be glowing white," he says. "Lyrium is blue."

That sounds like the effect of having a dragon soul shoved into him and then having half of it ripped out, which means it's probably Callida's fault in some way. Whoops.

"Does lyrium react strangely with -" she searches her translator for the correct word. "Souls?"

"...Not to my knowledge?"

"... Because, you had the," word lookup, is there a word for it besides 'dragon'? Yes! Yes there is. How convenient. "The Archdemon's soul in you. It was going to kill you. I, uh." She pauses, mildly embarrassed and trying to justify slightly insane logic. Occlus perhaps isn't going to literally kill her when she gets back home, but she is going to be in some trouble. She continues on anyway, pretending the pause was a pause for translation. "To save your life I ripped it in half, leaving you with half of the Archdemon's soul, which is much more manageable and less deadly. So it could be that causing the glow."

"Well," says one of the Statue Friends, "that explains the state you were in afterward."

"I'm impressed, that's the sort of crazy stunt I might try if I had the ability to manipulate souls," says Stalas.

Callida has the good sense to cough and look embarrassed.

"Well you would have died otherwise."

"And thank you very much for that," says Stalas. "I don't feel like an archdemon... I suppose maybe I wouldn't."

"You seem to have killed it, from what I can tell," assures Callida. "And you would notice its presence if you didn't."

"...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?"