[ The next breath she takes in is longer, deeper; the words had landed somewhere soft in her. It is a simple thing to disguise in places and professions where one cannot show that gentle landing. Perhaps Alexandrie is losing her edge. Perhaps it is a mark of trust. ]

My Loki was from this world. [ It is gently said; neither reminder nor admonition, only a small truth. She had loved another one, the same and different, from another world but—

She thinks it often, when she looks upon that portrait she'd painted of her husband with his face turned to profile, lifted to the night breeze sweetened by the blossoms from the land he had loved. Not always in words, but always with a kind of softness that aches. I had my turn.

She had had her turn with the man who had come from the rifts too, the Loki who had come to the drought of her like rain from a clear sky from far beyond the place where Thedas dreams and dies.

It was not enough, but it never would have been. And so it is the same enough as a lifetime could have given. ]

I am sorry. About your father. Did it feel to you as if time had split as well? How the world walks on and some parts of you go with it, and some walk only in place?