"It makes my breath and eyes glow blue and the one time I caught my reflection right after a lyrium vein I thought I looked very creepy, so, I guess I'm glad you like the look better than I do," he says.

"It's weird that I don't know what you look like," she sighs.

"Why didn't it work?"

"They don't give you a map when you're exiled to the Deep Roads for murder."

"Oh. And your Stonesense range doesn't get you all the way to an exit?"

"If it did, exile to the Deep Roads wouldn't make a very effective death sentence."

"Well, it is still full of monsters, but, yeah. ...This would be a great time for me to discover a really, really convenient artifact effect and just, I don't know, teleport us out of here. No luck. The one that makes water hurt does teleportation but I don't think those touched can take passengers, anyway..."

"Well, at least you could get out of here alive... anyway, the reason I bring up my crazy plan is that it's still the closest thing I've got to a long-term survival strategy, but will definitely involve taking insane risks that I would not normally consider, and I feel like you should have the chance to make an informed decision about whether you prefer the crazy plan or the more conservative but approximately equally doomed 'stay as far away from darkspawn as possible and try to find a route to the surface' strategy."

"...You know more about the situation than I do and I might, like, quietly freak out if you take insane risks but I'll still vote in favor of long term survival with possible incidental side benefits to third parties."

"If we actually find the Paragon Branka and she actually found the Anvil of the Void, it's conceivable that the side benefits to third parties will involve a complete turnaround of the entire war against the darkspawn from a holding action against the eventual destruction of the world to something actually winnable," he adds. "I mean, it's a long shot, but so was me surviving the past month, so."

"That. Sounds good, yeah."

"I thought so."

"So... let me know if there's anything I can do to help with my inadequately catalogued magical powers and the balance of a drunk toddler. Besides keeping a lookout for anything moving."

"Will do," he says. "And please let me know if you notice any more magical powers."

"I will."

"Anyway, in the absence of nearby darkspawn to hide from, what should we talk about while we walk...?"

"Um - story of your life?"

"Sure," he says cheerfully. "So, my father is a king and my mother was a noble hunter - do you need either of those concepts explained before I go on?"

"I know what kings are, noble hunter sounds out of context like some kind of extremely specialized assassin."

He snickers softly. "No. Uh, the condensed version: Orzammar has a mostly inflexible caste system and an increasingly desperate population problem. Mixed-caste couples are mostly frowned upon except that any child of such a couple takes the same caste as its corresponding parent, sons from fathers and daughters from mothers, so a woman of a lower caste who manages to produce a noble's son finds herself elevated to the station of her child, and the rest of her immediate family can come with. Noble hunting is therefore a very popular sport. The reverse, a lower-caste man getting with a higher-caste woman, is much rarer because she can always claim she got the baby somewhere else; whereas an heir is too precious a commodity for a nobleman to look at his bastard's mother and say 'I don't know what you're talking about, I never bedded that woman'. With me so far?"

"Approximately."

"So - because of the part where her close family also gets ennobled - a woman of low caste and childbearing age will sometimes be sponsored by a rich person also of low caste who covers all the bribes and the fancy outfits and so forth, then pretends to be her uncle or whatever if she succeeds. Since you don't get rich while casteless unless you're some flavour of criminal, the rivalries among these sponsors can get pretty nasty. My mother had a sponsor, her sponsor had a rival, he poisoned her when she got pregnant, she pursued some very sketchy treatments to try to stay alive long enough to have her child, and now here I am with some unfortunate health problems and the recently discovered ability to survive indefinitely off lyrium fumes."

"Health problems?"

"I'm an unbelievably skinny little weed compared to any healthy dwarf, and I bruise very easily."