"It's usually possible to find them before anything too awful happens, but not always. Most commonly they're between six and ten when they first start showing signs."

"Signs like...?"

"Either they start doing uncontrolled magic - moving things around without touching them, creating localized temperature and weather effects, sometimes other things - or someone finds them using magic. But mage-finding spells like that are unfortunately not very reliable. There are a handful of children every year who get possessed by demons because the demons noticed them before anyone else did."

"Can spirits tell mages where to find mage children? I'd assume they were in as good a position as demons to notice."

"The nature of spirits and the Fade makes that more difficult than you might think. A spirit could tell me they saw a mage nearby, if they remembered, but they might not know whether the mage was a child, and they almost certainly wouldn't be able to give me any useful information about the physical location of the mage in the material world. And 'nearby' in the Fade is loosely related to physical location, but the correspondence is nowhere near close enough to navigate by."

"Oh."

"What would be the danger?"

"I'm not sure. I just expect that if it were safe and easy, I would have heard of someone else having done it."

"I have the impression that there are a lot of interspecies-cooperation-related opportunities that have been completely ignored."

"Still. I have an impression of how I might send someone, a dwarf or just a non-mage, into the Fade in waking life. I don't know if it would work, and if it failed it might be harmful, and if it succeeded I would expect it to be less dangerous than entering the Fade as a mage because non-mages can't be possessed by demons, but more dangerous than dreaming because it would be... less imaginary. Someone who dies in a dream wakes up again. Someone who died in this kind of trip to the Fade might not."

Nod.

"After dealing with the Blight is reforming the Circle next?"

"Hopefully, yes. There are some political problems in Ferelden that I might have to handle first."

"I know almost nothing about the local surface cultures; what's going on in Ferelden?"

"Short or long version?"

"Short to start."

"The current Regent made a lot of questionable choices and now Grey Wardens are officially outlawed, in the middle of a Blight, in the exact same country where the Blight is starting," says Metella. "And if he continues making questionable choices, Ferelden is going to end up fighting a civil war and defending against a Blight at the same time. Even if I manage to get the Blight out of the way, I do not anticipate making much headway in reforming Ferelden's Circle while Loghain Mac Tir rules the kingdom."

"You're very diplomatic about describing people doing stupid things."

Metella giggles. So does Dagna.

"Does he have some reason for the questionable choice of outlawing Grey Wardens?"

"The former king made some questionable choices of his own that led to him dying in battle a few months ago, and there were Grey Wardens at the battle. The official story is that we betrayed the king to his death. What actually happened is that we were all supposed to fight some darkspawn together, the king and the Wardens and the Fereldan army and Loghain, and then about a hundred times the expected number of darkspawn showed up, and when Loghain received the signal to attack, he retreated instead, leaving the king and nearly all of the Wardens in Ferelden to die. Whether that's because he thought attacking the darkspawn at that point would be throwing lives away, or because he wanted the king to die so he could take power, is a question only he can answer. But the story he put out about the Grey Wardens... leaves a few things out, at the very least."

Sigh.

"Yes."