“As in Thedas, there is a...division that you describe that has never been present in the world of my birth.” Home feels wrong; of my birth is still not quite accurate, not with all she's learned of their existence here, what her nature is. It sits ill but it serves, and she allows it to stand without correcting herself. “'Magicians' and 'commoners', things that people are. Witchcraft is just this: a craft. A tool. A thing that people use, not a thing that they are.”

Behind them, Marius fades—

but it will not be a comfort for long.

“The penalty for witchcraft was death, with, as he has said, no distinction. Thus it was a crime of the desperate—the downtrodden. The weak, who had no other means to reach for strength, and greater fears than death. The thin hope that they might be so successful as to avoid it. A woman's sin, not a man's, who might better his life another way.”

Upon the ghostly gallows, the stool beneath a mage is kicked free and he falls in the air—the rope dissipates, and the robes puff out. By the time he lands, he is no man at all, but Petrana herself barely older than Kitty, falling to her arms upon a lush bed and followed down by Marius, yet untouched by age and care and cruelty.

“Peace,” he says, soothing, fingers splayed out on her back and sliding down, sat beside her sprawl. “Peace, my love.”

Petrana-who-was does not lift her head, sullen, furious: “From your mouth it is no less than God's own wisdom!”

“I am divinely inspired,” he offers, arch, pressing a kiss to the back of her shoulder, just above the laces of her gown. “Shall I offer my goddess worship?”

Muffled into her arm: “You may offer me his head, for I am wrathful.”

Gentler, his hand settling at her waist, “I admit, it wasn't quite what I had in mind.” He lets her seethe, a little longer— “Don't be vexed, Petrana Solene. You're the best of me. They are small people in a small world and we're going to forget more than they've ever known when we're done. No one will ignore you when you're my wife.”

A sigh, and—it spins, dizzying, as she rolls over. His hair lengthens, his cheekbones sharpen; the tight, elaborate coiffure she had worn spreads out to loose curls upon a pillow, her round face drawn tight and weary. The bed they sit upon is rougher hewn, with plain bedding, and the blur of room around them...not a room at all, but a tent.

“I should never have come here.” Her voice is faint and rough; she gazes past him, does not notice the way his expression tightens, though even at a distance the way his grip on her shoulder does is difficult to miss. “I asked one thing of you, Marius, just one thing. One thing.”

“You are tired,” he tells her, touching her jaw. “You're tired.”

“No,” Petrana says, quietly, a terrible aching echo of herself; the quiet horror of it underscored by how empty it sounds, echoing out of the past. “No,” the younger Petrana repeats. “I sleep and I wake and nothing is changed.”

“You get stronger,” he says, so terribly soft.

She rolls over, away from him: “You don't.” His hand hovers over her shoulder, a moment longer, and then he rises—fades into nothing as he walks toward and then through Kitty and Petrana.