"I don't know how long it'll take and I don't fancy getting eaten." She gets unsteadily to her feet. "This not seeing thing I do now is very weird."

"What's it like?"

"There's no colors or directionality... I can not-see behind me just fine. It goes through stuff. About - a hundred feet, two hundred? If my estimate's any good and it might not be. And fading out from there. I can't concentrate on it all at once though. I can just tell where stuff is in that radius and sort of its - texture and density?"

"...that sounds amazingly useful for noticing darkspawn - if your magic is translating units of distance accurately I think that's farther than I can sense them," he says. "Although it stops short of Stone-sense, so I'm still the better navigator."

"I'll let you know if anything moves. Is Stone-sense like not seeing for rock?"

"Yeah. Dwarf thing."

"...Yes?"

"Oh. We don't have those. Do I look like a recognizable species to you?"

"You look human, if I had to guess. My understanding of humans is much more theoretical than practical."

"Yeah, I'm a human. We only have humans. I mean, and nonsapient animals and plants."

"Humans, dwarves, elves, qunari. Darkspawn," he says. "It's arguable whether darkspawn belong to the category 'people'. You seem to be a human so I guess you know what those are like, I'm outrageously skinny for a dwarf and a little taller than normal but otherwise a reasonable example, elves tend to be between my height and yours and have long pointed ears and fragile builds, qunari are tall and have short pointed ears and horns. Darkspawn are mostly vaguely people-shaped but vary in which people they're shaped vaguely like."

"I'll... do my best to learn to tell the difference."

"The question's pretty academic down here anyway. You'll be encountering me, darkspawn, and maybe the Legion of the Dead, who are all dwarves. And I suppose if I succeed in finding the lost Paragon you will meet her too, but she and her retinue are also all dwarves."

"Okay, so what's the shape difference between a dwarf-resembling darkspawn and an actual dwarf?"

"Okay. I mean, I don't think I have a death ray, but I have no idea. I'll try to be conservative and wait for you to tell me either way on some examples."

"...If you did have a death ray and didn't know it, how would you find out?"

"I don't know it would depend on the artifact and whether it was a good effect or a bad one," she says, unutterably frustrated. "I don't recognize anything I've noticed so far, I think these must have been new ones on their way to the university for the Dean to figure out. I am, obviously, not fatal to be near, small mercy, I - I need you to be alive."

"That sounds terrifying on multiple levels," he says. "I'm sorry you're in such an awful situation."

"Yeah." Sigh. "I may - have some side effects sort of lying in wait, some of them are contingent, the university has one that makes it really painful to touch water. So if I'm suddenly incapacitated or catch fire or something then I would appreciate if you removed me from whatever thing was novel in my environment, at least until and unless it turns out that's just going to happen every certain number of hours or something..."

"Sure," he says. They are making slow progress along the tunnel; he pauses again and says, "And here's a vein of lyrium. I'm not actually sure what the fumes do to humans, so don't do what I'm about to do." And he goes up to it and inhales.

She stands back.

He steps back after a few breaths. "...I'm sort of curious what your not-seeing can tell about the difference between me right before and right after lyrium," he says, emitting small clouds of glowing blue smoke with every exhalation.

"Your breath is different? There's some changing density. I'm not very good at figuring out what everything I'm - sensing - actually is. It's... it's pretty?"