I think it's like coin tricks, you can get good at it but then you know how it's done and it's just not the same. You see through it. Loses the shine.

[That's not what she's talking to him for, and she wasn't meant to know that, that's been the saving grace of pretty much everyone being in his favourite place in Thedas without him right now.]

Or it slips right through your fingers, rolls off down the street into a gutter or behind the furniture, d'you want to go clawing it out? That's hard y'know?

[Asher was big. And loud. And full of life but there was something in him that wasn't-- he looks at Aura when he's last seen her, Aura who's closest to Asher of anyone still living and she's fairly big, and full of life, not loud but they have the same eyes until you go looking in and her eyes aren't elsewhere half the time.

Yngvi has a mirror for practice. You can get good at it. What people need to see or want to see. No one wants a miserable dwarf unless he's respectable and they owe him coin, his father of all the fathers would say to him with one big heavy hand pressing him down, down, down. Einar looked happy enough. He thinks. Yngvi doesn't look like Einar though.]

Maybe that's what it is then, reaching for a thing and there's someone there so you don't fall flat.