Palatable or not, the thing that stings most in retrospect is how proud she'd been of something that didn't work. It's still a battle every time to be taken seriously; they're still fighting to convince the rest of Thedas that it might be in their best interests to work in their own best interests. It was a curiosity, short-lived, and an embarrassment when she looks back on it even as she keeps finding herself looking back on it, her feelings on it entangled, less consistent than she imagines, only ever existing in the one moment where she feels the one way, and always inclined to believe that it's always been.

He says terrible forbidden magics as she follows him into the Sanctum, and she stops thinking so much about propaganda, the gaze of her one true eye fixed hard on the space between his shoulder-blades.

“It does sound more like he killed himself with someone else's hand,” is what she says, instead of what kind and do you know them. “Sounds like they needed him to decide, or else they probably wouldn't have been able to do it.”

This architecture doesn't feel like it entirely matches the exterior. It's not quite disorienting, which is itself...sort of disorienting.