Fern can't be older than eighteen or nineteen, which would have made her quite young during the Blight--but old enough to have vivid memories of it, to remember the pain of being thrust out of her family's little homestead on the human farmer's property, her parents left to fend for themselves, and for her, while the farmer took his human family and servants and abandoned the rest. Old enough that it left scars that still twinge, time to time.

"How long? Enough that it's stopped stinging I hope?"

Here, Araceli means a different kind of ache. "It's better, now that I'm here in Kirkwall," she admits, her brows knitting into a puzzled little furrow. "I still don't really understand what happened... Can we get rid of them?"