Beneath the robe, she is still wearing a thin slip— more a gesture to courtesy than to modesty, and even from the front it’s apparent that it’s been torn in the back. The why of that is almost immediately apparent as she shivers her shoulders and wings flare out from where they had been pressed close to her skin instead, no larger than her torso, insect-like, shimmering like the stained glass that features in some windows of La Souveraineté. Prism-like, the thin morning light refracts through them and shatters colours across the walls and floor of the room, shifting inconsistently with the anxious flutter of their motion.

The rest of her doesn't move.

“The rifters with us were changed worse, different, but — temporarily.” Mostly if not entirely gone by the time they had returned to Kirkwall. Not so, these. “Theirs started to come away on the road back. After we cleaned my back up,” the slow way she’s talking around not jostling the bones in her face makes it stilted, strange, as if this wasn’t already, “it’s like they just. Healed in place. Everyone but us this happened to is dead.”

It’s vanishingly rare for Gwenaëlle to look at him so— straightforwardly. A calm that she’s holding with her nails. The absence of edge, no roll of her remaining eye,

it doesn’t make this less unsettling.