Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.
The woman with the robe and staff regards Cam with a thoughtful, slightly perturbed expression. Assuming she is his summoner, she has given him several new languages: one which is mutually intelligible with English but varies substantially in its details, one which seems to be a kind of crypto-Latin with an attached runic alphabet in addition to the Latinlike one it shares with pseudo-English, and one which has no roots in anything Cam has ever heard of. She speaks pseudo-English natively, and reads and writes the others with scholarly fluency.
"Oh, I would have shown up in a circle, but the circle would not be made of ice and you would speak some different complement of languages - this one is like my first, enough that it could have been some strange dialect in some obscure location that gets little press, and one of 'em's like Latin, less explicable, and I haven't even got a guess about language the third. Also I usually wouldn't be allowed to talk and you would want me to make you something and you'd probably give me a list of books or movies for my trouble."
"They're equally easy to summon. So if people routinely make circles on the ground that have words in some language around them, you could also find yourself with appearing angels and fairies, but I doubt very much that accidents of this nature are at all common. You could also do it on purpose if I told you how. But since this is a weird alternate universe and I don't even know if I can go home, I don't recommend summoning any more anythings."
"...Yes. Space being the sky. You know how if you go really high up a mountain the air thins out? It keeps getting thinner until there is none. Space is the part where there is none, and there's other planets, and other suns, and other moons, and they're mostly ludicrously far away in planetary terms, but you can get there if you sit in the right kinda vehicle and a fairy helps or you have a lot of fuel to burn. Again, this all only applies here if things are, you know, basically normal except for frost spells and the like."
"Which you don't know because you haven't been able to examine the sky, I suppose. Yes. I want to drag you immediately to a library and get all the differences between our worlds worked out as fast as possible, but I think instead of doing that I should be finding some way to conceal you. People who suddenly appear in the tower without having been let in by the templars are going to cause some alarm regardless of details, and the wings and tail are unlikely to help."
"I am amenable, and yes, people do it every day. I don't think you have time to receive an entire eight-credit course on bindings and tasks, though, so I can just leave you instructions on how to get me in particular, loose like I am now, rather than taking your chances with random apsels."
"Possibly. Or - how would you translate it into Tevinter or dwarvish? Dwarvish doesn't have a single word for demon, since they didn't have much direct contact with them when the language was still in common use; they called them 'Fade-monsters', which you certainly aren't."
Cam thinks about it, then makes a piece of paper with a circle surrounded by the Dwarvish words I summon the maker and then Cam's full name in English. "I could transliterate my name but that's sometimes iffy and you know this alphabet, so. Draw this on a floor with enough room for me in it, close the circle only after you write all of the words."
Two weeks and one day later, he gets a personal summon.
The circle is drawn in chalk on a stone floor, but it is not the same stone floor, because this one is outdoors in what looks to be the ruin of some kind of medieval fortification. It is the middle of the night. There is an ordinary-looking moon in the sky. His summoner is wearing a very similar robe to last time, but carrying a more elaborate staff, and her hair is slightly messier.
"Let me guess," she says the moment he appears, "you don't know anything about darkspawn."
"Darkspawn are horrible creatures that come from deep underground and kill anyone they see. My country is currently being invaded by them, and it looks like it might turn out to be a Blight, which is when a darkspawn-tainted dragon called an 'archdemon' leads an army of darkspawn to try to take over the world and destroy all life."
"Yes. Well, ordinary darkspawn are. I get the impression that archdemons are more difficult, and not necessarily just because they're enormous dragons. But I'm not a Grey Warden - the people whose job it specifically is to deal with darkspawn and darkspawn-related things - so I don't know the details."
"I'm not sure launching one into space would particularly help. Their ability to control darkspawn doesn't seem to be substantially limited by distance, although from what I can gather they prefer to personally accompany their armies at least most of the time. The same problems apply to restraining one."
"It's known to happen if you eat darkspawn, or get their blood in your blood. I think certain magical artifacts can also spread it, but that's much rarer and may only be a baseless rumour. A ghoul is a tainted person; they lose their minds, become obsessed with darkspawn, and eventually run away to serve them. Or die. Many tainted people just die."
"I can't die, as far as I know, unless local magical effects can kill me, and I wouldn't want to bet on it. I don't know if I can become a ghoul either, but I don't want to test it. If a ghoul-me could also use my magic, me becoming one would be sufficiently awful that I should probably engage with darkspawn only with the help of binoculars, if at all."
"Distance is basically immaterial for these purposes - I could put stuff on the moon from here - but I have to know where to put it, which means seeing or having extremely detailed maps of where things are going. Assuming I can destroy darkspawn in some relatively straightforward way, such as by filling their abdominal cavities with liquid nitrogen - uh, very very cold partial air? - then I can handle any army I can see roughly as fast as I can look at them, and I don't know if you've invented binoculars yet but I can see things from quite a long way away with a pair and I can make them myself. I'd want to be very sure that I could distinguish darkspawn from non-darkspawn without fail, how easily recognizable are these things, are we talking forty legs and poison dart frog color schemes or, like, zombies?"
"Elves are also shorter than humans but taller than dwarves. Qunari are large humanoids with horns and greyish skin. Darkspawn also come in four varieties: hurlocks, genlocks, shrieks, and ogres. They seem to correspond to the kinds of people, but I haven't been able to find out why. Hurlocks are similar to humans, genlocks to dwarves, shrieks are similar to elves but with longer limbs, and ogres are similar to qunari but much, much bigger. All darkspawn have sharp pointed teeth."
"Not exactly besieged, but food would help. I haven't summoned you on anything like an official basis, though, so there's a limit to what you can do openly. People who can do magic without authorization are not well thought of, and the fact that you can do new inexplicable impossible magic won't help anything. Unless we dress you up as some sort of miracle-working prophet, I suppose, but false prophet is probably not that much safer than apostate as careers go."
"How about you get rid of your wings and tail and acquire reasonable clothes and I show you what's in the food stockpiles and you make more of it? People are less likely to notice that there's more food today than there was yesterday if it comes in the form of a few extra sacks of flour than if it comes in the form of fudge."
"That depends on what you want to pass yourself off as, I suppose. If we're mostly going to be interacting with non-mages, you could pretend to be one of the Tranquil by not talking much and keeping your face and voice very calm, and people wouldn't think much of you; I know less about what you'd need to do to pass for a common soldier. The robes of the Tranquil are much like mine, but not so well decorated."
"Especially without the wings, I don't have good enough balance to pass as a soldier for longer than thirty seconds. I will fall on something and it will be clear I could not have survived being handed a sword. Are you going to be around to give me cues if I pretend to be a 'Tranquil'? What is a Tranquil?"
"Mages are very vulnerable to possession by demons; Tranquil are completely immune to it. I believe that was the original justification for inventing the process. But Tranquil are also very useful - they can perform certain kinds of valuable work that are hazardous to anyone with a connection to the Fade, and they are almost impossible to distract and don't really form their own goals. So even if safety dictates that some mages should be made Tranquil, the number of mages actually being made Tranquil is definitely more than that. It's a problem."
"Not that I can think of. The advantage of pretending to be Tranquil is that most people who know anything about them find them at least a little bit creepy and won't try to talk to you much. Anyone in this camp is either a mage, a Tranquil, some kind of soldier, or with the Chantry. You can't do the right kind of magic, you've said you can't pass for a soldier, and I don't think I can explain enough religion to you in a short enough time for you to plausibly pass as a Chantry brother."
"Castles are less useful as fortifications when military technology advances and less fun to have as residences when it's no longer useful to have dozens of servants per single high-status family. Knights became obsolete too. And a lot of countries with kings more or less violently overthrew them and switched to a system of voting for representatives to generate their legislation and do their international diplomacy with less crown-wearing and more adherence to pre-designed constitutions of checks on their power."
"I can recommend many books. Tranquil do read. No one will think anything of it if you sit out here with a stack of books and a candle. How long a list would you like, and on what topics? History? Geography? Astronomy? Magic? History of the Blight will certainly tell you all about darkspawn..."
"Hmm. The Arcane in Principle and Practice, by First Enchanter Lilian around 8:12 Blessed, and for history Ancient Days and Ages Past by Angus Wren - usually found in the two respective volumes - and When We Held the Roads by Ordon Tethras. You really need to go to a dwarven source to even begin to understand dwarven history, and he's a very accessible writer."