Something shifts in the carefully constructed mask of good cheer she has adopted. It is, perhaps incongruously, the echo of a more genuine version of the thing lurking in a blink, in the very minor adjustment of the line of her shoulder, and the smoothing of her thumb across other faintly ink stained fingertips.

"Well, yes. But that is precisely why I had spent so little time on the subject - the reflecting on the thing, as it were. There is every likelihood that we will leave Thedas without any warning, and that we will take those abilities we brought with us when we go. Why, there are only three other Rifters who have been here as long or longer than myself."

Unbeknownst to her, this number has already reduced itself by one.

"Obviously I cannot dispute the appeal of the Rift research. There may very well be value in it for anyone who comes after us, or even for the war effort. But if my presence here is to be at all remarkable for Thedas and not just for people like the two of us, it seems far more prudent to see that the continuation of my work need not be so reliant on my own hand in it. That it have some application which immediately looks beyond the study of the Fade and whatever we might discover about how and why we came from it."