She takes a look at him sidelong. There’s your first problem, she thinks about saying. Thinking you get to have a home. Taking on their pain and fright.

"Hero’s what you call it when someone fucks it all enough can’t no call it otherwise and pretend they’re still on top."

Ain’t the Inquisition just full of those, people looking for heroics. First it was the mountains, then it was Orlais. Now Kirkwall — what next? Armies march slow, she ought to know, but generals; generals trip over themselves to talk the fastest.

Call it a cause. Call it a mission what needs spreading, call it worth any cost. What it is, it's hunger. It's every man wants something for themselves: Greed for glory, for a mark on history, for the right to shout that you were.

(Guts soothed and a bruised conscience.)

Maybe they'll do some good with this war, but everyone's going to do a lot of bad on the way. That's just how it works.

"Weren’t that it were no better. Just was you got used to the shape. ’S like a ship in a bottle, yeah?"

That. Probably makes sense somehow, to someone. It's good enough to keep the stream of consciousness rolling, she reckons. Conversations like these, they're not conversations so much as one long, rolling rant.

Pass it back between your mouths like some other simile you're too shit tired to think up, one you shouldn't know the words for anyway.