Gwenaëlle doesn't immediately move from where she's lain in cushions; doesn't immediately answer, so he could imagine that she hasn't heard him, or simply doesn't wish to. She's thinking of — we didn't always, you know, or any of the many other ceilings she's looked up at since her life changed, or all of those who came and went in the meanwhile. Not the rifters, but Thedosians— joined this cause and then left it, for whatever reason, to whatever end. Watching their retreating backs, or not, only hearing of it after the fact; all of them who could leave when she cannot.

“In the first year or so,” she says, eventually, “I wondered if Solas didn't already know how to remove the anchor without an axe.” A theory she has, over the years, largely kept to herself; it was a long time before she entirely let it go. (Now, she thinks: if he could have claimed that power for himself before he left, he would have done it.) “I thought— well, from the beginning, removing the anchor was never the most pressing goal of the Inquisition. When Trevelyan held the whole thing, alone, it was just. Hers to bear.”

Necessary.

“I thought in his position, I wouldn't tell anyone, either. Even now. What happens if everyone does that? My shard is one of the few strong enough to close most rifts alone. That hasn't become less pressing in the interim. It'd be...” She screws up her face, shaking her head though at this angle the gesture means little. “If it's the only option when we don't need them any longer— a conversation for then. It's one thing to allow that as an option for those who don't use them in the field.”

By her tone, more troubled than censorious, she's still not completely at ease with the idea of allowing that, voluntarily, though she adds conscientiously: “If it could have been cut out of that elf it killed, it should have been. And I'd rather have Poppell de Fonce down an arm than have us be down her, obviously.”

It just seems to her that perhaps those should be the only circumstances—