#god there's so much more but it's very incoherent/fragmentary still

[edda-grenade]

yes hullo i'd like to hear more about feral verse it sounds G R E A T

@lesquatrechevrons replied to your photoset  “when you’ve just awoken from millennia of slumber and trying to figure…”

I am Delighted by this (as per usual, that art, her glee his ‘oh fuck but also cute but also no’ also she’s so Strok.  gold a++++) and I’d love to know more! Take this as a formal and kind request to see how you see All The Evens play out in this universe, plz *chinhands with starry eyes*                   

STRAP IN :DDD

the basic conceit of feral verse is, as mentioned, that a) solas wakes up like 16 years earlier than in canon, and b) saar’s family wasn’t attacked by an arvaarad troop when she was 17-ish, so she’s still with them by the time she’s 21

and then she finds this strange forest sprite of an elf who is capital W Weird but also A MAGE HOLY SHIT YES TEACH ME

(fun fact, solas goes from WHAT NO ABSOLUTELY NOT to ASK ME ANYTHING in the span of like 3 days. saar’s persistent. and, lbr, he’s drowning on his own)

so these are the big inciting incident changes, and everything else basically flows from there. solas gets progressively pulled into saar’s life despite his best efforts, her vashoth community, the dalish clans with whom they trade and on occasion travel with, mercenaries and surface dwarves and the list goes on. and, like the world and its people do in canon during da:i, it gets under his skin

he teaches her magic and she teaches him whatever random shit he for some reason doesn’t know. it’s very much a give and take, with him being knowledgable about magic, spirits, the fade, and her being knowledgable about this new world that he’s only seen through fragmentary memories (yeah, ngl this verse is also fueled in part by me being grossed out by how often solavellan gets written into a creepy teacher/student dynamic all like, ohhh hahren, ohh da’len BUT I DIGRESS)

far more importantly, saar keeps a running list in her head, ‘reasons solas is most likely not an elf but a sprit/elf hybrid, demon/elf hybrid, some kind of abyssal creature taken physical form, abyssal creature Forced into physical form, escaped blood magic experiment, etc.’ to the point where when she eventually Does find out who & what he really is it’s almost a letdown?

solas: i am fen’harel, ancient not-god of rebellionsaar: fuck, really? my bet was on escaped tevene blood magic experiment, now i owe my mom a new knifesolas: …………excuse me, what

there’s still a looot of stuff where i’m working out the details of how and when but the trajectory then is that saar eventually finds out basically everything the inq also knows by the end of trespasser, MEANWHILE solas goes through his usual crisis re: His Duty but the point is. the point is. eventually, they end up on the same page: the veil needs to come down—but slowly.

bit by bit they want to let magic bleed back into the world to some day end up in a future that isn’t arlathan restored exactly as it was, but a better version of it, with magic and spirits but without the godkings and the slavery and all the terrible shit solas tried to seal away the first time

that’s the plan, anyway.

and they set out to make that happen, scraping at the veil, finding places where spirits get twisted into demons and, idk, cleansing them or smth, this part is still very vague in my head (though i’m def gonna incorporate that live-action thing with the mask of fen’harel somehow)

and then, one day, they figure out where solas’s fucking focus is. the orb.

EXCEPT they’re not the only ones after it—corypheus gets his hands on it, meanwhile the mage-templar war is happening and it’s all a big fucking mess and they barely manage to track him to the conclave to try and get it back before he does something terrible and we all know how that goes

the conclave goes up in flames, the breach appears, saar wakes up with the anchor in her hand. and then, when cassandra takes her to the temple and they meet varric and cullen and solas, solas introduces himself

and saar is like WAIT WHAT.

and she gets him alone at the first opportunity to be like, why the fuck are we pretending we don’t know each other??

and he admits that he panicked, maybe, a little bit, in the aftermath of the explosion? but the thing is: they’re both mages, neither of them human, which already puts them at a disadvantage. second, cass & co think saar murdered the divine, she’s the one with the mark and solas is the only one who seems to know anything about the mark, if it was known they came here as a unit it’d make them look GUILTY AS ALL HELL

also, like. technically. they are planning to bring the veil down. just not all at once

tl;dr: da:i happens, but saar and solas are in cahoots and have to pretend they didn’t know each other beforehand, cue shenanigans (& PINING, pls, these two fuckers trying to pretend they’re not in love? hilarious)

and like, obviously this set-up changes A Lot of the character dynamics, i’m working on that, but also pls imagine every fucking instance of solas dropping Hints and Clues bc he can’t fucking help himself and meanwhile saar knows and has to maintain pokerface

vivienne: solas has basically no history and i find that just a tad suspicious, don’t you agree?saar, knowing full well why his backstory is paper-thin and wouldn’t hold up to proper scrutiny for a second: UHHHHHHhave you considered maybe he really is just a feral little forest man, they don’t tend to feature prominently in. like. history.solas, later that day: ‘feral little forest man’, REALLYsaar: you ate a raw rabbit once with your bare handssolas: vhenan, we shared that rabbit