So. "Haven."

He'd call it quaint or charming, but Dorian rather likes his teeth where they are, if it's all the same.

Seeker Pentaghast is just waiting for an excuse, and the Commander isn't any happier with his presence here - an ex-Templar, they say, and that means quite a bit more than he's used to. Overall, though, Dorian can't help but feel a little disappointed - yes, his arrival has been met with a fair measure of alarm and intrigue, but between the Qunari mercenary-spy at the gates and the Orlesian Enchanter in the Chantry hall, it seems he's just one more mismatched part in a very strange machine.

Still, there is the ego-affirming several-foot radius around him at all times - a pair of Chantry sisters actually jumped out of his way earlier - and dead silence in front of the door to the small, single-room shelter he's been given, a Templar guard stationed just far enough away that she's plausibly not there only to deal with him.

Right.

So far, Dorian's only visitor has been a small, blonde elf with truly tragic hair, leaning through his doorway just long enough for a startled glance and a 'fecking gobshite' before disappearing again. Perhaps some poor, wandering madwoman, if her choice of attire was anything to go by.

A storm has been roaring its way through Haven since his arrival - yes, it really is this cold all the time and yes people really do live here by choice and yes they still distrust magic even if it's the only thing that's kept Dorian's face from freezing off - and so he's been content to spend much of his time studying the notes they'd recovered from Redcliffe. Alexius' notes, his notes - and they'd been delivered to him fast enough that Dorian doubts the Inquisition has even made a full copy of their own. Funny to have them returned at all, and just as he had been planning the best way to steal them back without having any inconspicuous scouts tossing him off even less-conspicuous cliffs.

'Sister' Leliana might not bother expending the energy to see him dead, but should he conveniently vanish-to-death Dorian doubts they'd lower many flags.

Process of elimination suggests he has the Herald to thank for all he does have, the only one with the influence to make it happen and also the only person in a thousand miles that might be dependably on his side.

"I'm the one who's dying," Felix had said, with the sort of honest acceptance Dorian has never had about anything, "and I'm half-certain I'll still outlive you."

Dorian can't help but smile, because it all had been rather slapdash and reckless - absurdly reckless, strolling into the middle of the southern war, multiple wars, even in Alexius' shadow - and that on top of everything that had come before in Minrathous. He smiles because a pack and his favorite staff is all he has in the world now. A borrowed hovel and a fire that he cannot stoke high enough to ignore the hint of cold lurking behind it, hungry and waiting - but for all of that he's still himself, isn't he?

He's still here.

The smile fades, of course, as he flips his way through page after page of Alexius' careful notations - a script that goes from familiar and tidy to far less legible over time, with dried pools of ink finally smearing across the pages, where the pen had rested for too long. He can only guess what the man holding it had been thinking of - what? Regret? Determination? Carving out every piece of himself that mattered to buy those few more seconds for his son? The bundle of paper feels like a stone in his hand, weighted down with so much pointless loss and Dorian's had the time to accept it all and yet his thoughts keep running in the same dull circles.

The sort of problem a thing like time magic ought to be able to fix, but Dorian had known from the start that they were skirting the edge of the possible even as he was trying to nail down the theory. It's always going to be a more useful philosophical exercise than a proper field of study. Dorian would like to admire the way Alexius got it working but there's only a few ways to manage the sort of shortcuts he's looking at and damn it, damn it he wanted no part of this. The Alexius he used to know would want no part of this.

No use in lingering over how it all changed, or how for all that sacrifice, nothing was left of Felix, of his broken friend in that broken world that never will be. How he is still dying in the here and now, will die, and it's unfair and a damned waste but there are lines that aren't meant to be crossed, even for the terribly clever, even to right the worst of wrongs.

Still, with a bit of work Dorian might yet be able to salvage some useful fragment of all that research. If not quite pitching himself headfirst through time, then a variant on what he'd seen at the rifts, subtle temporal manipulation over a managably short range. A tricky bit of spellcraft, if he can get it to work at all, but even if it doesn't the results won't tear reality in half. It will at least give him a puzzle to keep his mind occupied, while the world decides if it feels like ending.

As for the rest of it… Dorian calmly rips out a page, the only record of months of work, and who knows what greater cost - and crumples it up, tossing it into the fire. A dozen more pages follow it to ash. No scholar worth the word wants to see knowledge destroyed, especially with such a price already spent, but he can't think of anything from this but a weapon that too many will want and that no one should have.

Power he did not pay for, and there's far greater value in letting that go.