He sighs.

"...Because someone's being stupid," he summarizes. "When the Blight started, King Cailan took the army down to where a lot of darkspawn were gathering, and he tried to fight them. But there were a hundred times more darkspawn than anybody thought, and Cailan and most of the army died in the fighting. His wife's father, Loghain, was there, leading part of the army; when Loghain saw the king about to be overrun by thousands of darkspawn, he took his part of the army and ran away. Now Loghain is the Regent - that's like a temporary king, for when the king dies and there isn't an heir or they can't find the heir right away or the heir is a child and needs to grow up before they can start ruling the country. And Loghain is being very stupid about the Blight."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't know. I know what he's doing but not why he's doing it. He left Cailan to die, and then he blamed it on the Grey Wardens - I'm a Grey Warden, so is Elissa, so is Ambrose; the Grey Wardens are a group of people dedicated to fighting darkspawn and ending Blights, and we're the only people who can kill an Archdemon, and Loghain lied to everyone and said the Grey Wardens got Cailan killed on purpose, and he outlawed Grey Wardens - meaning he announced that any Grey Wardens in Ferelden should leave and if we don't leave he'll have us killed."

"Why are you the only people who can kill an Archdemon?"

"...When an Archdemon dies, its spirit moves to the nearest darkspawn, and that darkspawn turns into the Archdemon. The Grey Wardens figured out a way to have the Archdemon's spirit move into a Grey Warden instead, which kills the Archdemon for good. But you need a Grey Warden very very close to the Archdemon for that to work. And the Warden who takes the Archdemon's spirit also dies."

"I really did think the Valar had talked Eru out of this sort of thing."

"...what?"

"Stalas explained gods, sort of - the Valar are gods, I suppose, but Eru is a bigger god, and he really shouldn't be, because he doesn't - he likes sad stories. He used to set up his sad stories with people and the Valar mean well and didn't know about it and when they learned more they convinced him to get smaller until he could just read books like a normal person and now Quendi write very sad music and terribly tragic poetry and Eru lives on Araman and judges contests - but we didn't know about here, and this is very much to his taste."

...he isn't sure what to do with that.

"It is very annoying if he was hiding a world that needed Valar on it a thousand years ago and instead has been struggling along with people who die. For. No. Reason."

"Oh, we've had people who die for no reason for much longer than that. It's the darkspawn that are new. Well. Last-thousand-years-or-so new."

"That makes it worse, not better."

"Yeah."

"I suppose it's also possible that this is not actually a world Eru made, and I'm too far away to be saved to Mandos from here."

"...Is that better or worse?"

"Worse for me, if anything happens to me. Maybe better for you, if my disappearing lets the Valar find the world because Eru was never hiding it in the first place."

"...I'd feel bad for you if anything happened to you but I think Thedas is better off if we're not made by Eru."

"Well, the worst that can happen to me is apparently not as bad as the worst that can happen to people here."

"Yeah. Maybe our spirits do wander some distant corner of the Fade after we die, I don't know, but then do dwarves' spirits go to the Stone or do they just... not?"

"At home it's only people with chips who can come back but even people without only die if they have some kind of accident. Which kills them before they can get to help."

"Yeah. Your home sounds like a really nice place."

"Yeah."

"Well. We can find somewhere safe for you to stay while we go save the world."

"I appreciate that, although if there's a way I can help save the world that seems better than not."

"If you want to help out, we can probably find something for you to do. You can ask Elissa."