"The Inquisitor is... really quite remarkable. A Dalish elf, like yourself, but I'm almost certain a different clan. Her Keeper had sent her to the Conclave to watch, so she was there when it exploded and the hole in the sky opened up. Rather than dying, she fell physically into the Fade. She came out again, too, with a thing on her hand that let her close rifts." There was rather more to it than that, more detail, more specifics, but Dorian sensed that Merrill's inquiry wasn't magical-technical.

"The Inquisition sort of formed around her after that. I, for example, met her in Redcliffe. She was trying to coax the rebel mages there to join her, but my old mentor had swooped in before she could. Using time magic, which I helped him design but had never worked until the world was unraveling anyway. The Inquisitor and I were thrown into a hellish nightmare future, gained a few hints about enemy plans, and long story short I managed to reverse the spell and send us back to very nearly the moment we'd gone." That version of events was leaving a lot out, but the less Dorian had to think about the future that almost had been, the better. It hadn't hurt, much, at the time to watch the Inquisitor's companions dying to buy them time, but it was the stuff of nightmares now.