He reaches out, and he pulls her hand to him, holds her hand in both of his. Long fingers stroke along her knuckles, turn her palm-up and trace the lines.

"Did you ever truly doubt that it was someone's make?" he asks, genuinely. "Whether divine punishment or magic gone wrong, or worse? It was not there, and then it was, and there is only one way that ever has happened."

It was too many shocks, too quickly. She is always impatient to get to the answer, to the end, and he let himself match the pace. Humans have changed him so much -- he wonders if he will even recognize himself, eventually.

If there is an eventually.

"Corypheus," he agrees. "Because the Blight was stopped, then. Arrogant as I was, I knew I could stop it: all the wars. All the slavery. The new, fresh threat. Do you see now?"

Do you see why he raised the Veil?

"Because every other option was worse," he says, quoting himself, calling back to a moment where he would not give her even this much chance. "I did not lie to you."

He says that quite often in this story, it seems. I did not lie to you. No, he just fed her crumbs of the truth, too scant to reach any conclusions.

With a wave of his free hand, Solas calls water out of one of the fountains. It turns itself into a frozen model, something like the black city, a shape with seven sides. "Seven gates to the Black City," he says. "Seven Old Gods, one slumbering at each entrance, to keep it in. To keep them in." He opens his hand, and seven blue lights spring into being, little wisps coming at Solas's invitation. "But when someone finds a way to break the seal on those entrances, steps inside, and finds the Blight within..."

One of the lights turns red.

"You see, your Chantry was not so wrong, after all," says Solas. "The magisters were the ones who let it out."