#oops all dragon age?

[omniblades-and-stars]

6 pairing of your choice?

Ok listen I think I just needed something soft and thoughtful and then I did way too much. Sorry? Anyways, this is everyone's reminder that I cut my teeth on writing Dragon Age fanfic.

From this ask meme here.

bound and undone

some things get easy with time

It wasn’t unusual for him to wake in the small hours of the morning, when the sun was just a whisper of pink on the horizon and the birds still had the grace to be quiet, and find himself alone. Valethen was taken to walking in the woods on her own when they traveled, she claimed it was a Dalish thing, but Thom knew the truth. She needed the solitude.

He’d asked her once, what she got up to when she wandered away when most folk, Maker-fearing or not, had the good sense to sleep for a couple hours more. She simply offered a demure smile and said, “We all have our secrets, Thom. Please allow me mine.” The smile didn’t reach her eyes.

That is what she always said when their conversations edged to close to home, to Cyrion. Valethen had told him as much as she was willing about her husband from long before she’d ever gone to the ill-fated Conclave. And how she still harbored guilt that she had been unable to save his life.

Thom was many things, a fool chief among them, but he was not the sort to pry about where he wasn’t wanted. It bothered him not at all that Val liked to walk among the trees and speak to her husband’s memory when she couldn’t go back to sleep. Everyone had their way of praying. And she’d had her gods snatched right out from beneath her previously sure feet. It would have been a matter of cruelty to deny her the one connection to her life before, the one thing that truly mattered to her. Furthermore, it was his firm belief that he had no right to interfere with her rituals.

No, her need for solitude didn’t bother him. But on that morning, wiping the sleep from heavy eyes, he couldn’t shake a deep feeling that something was wrong. He sat up quickly, taking note of anything in the tent that might have been out of place. But everything was just as it should have been.

He had one boot about half on his foot when he heard again what must have woken him, and worried him so.

The subdued but very distinct sound of a woman crying.

His boots forgotten, Thom rushed from the tent with newfound purpose. Valethen was stoic, some even accused her (wrongly) of being cold, and he had only ever seen her cry once: when Solas took her arm and shattered her already fragile heart, disappearing to leave her to pick up all of the pieces on her own. Again.

Thom didn’t have far to look, a blessing for his bare feet on a cold morning. Valethen sat in front of the fire, restoked and burning low. She cradled her face in her hand, soaked raven-dark hair, shot through with grey, clung to her back, and a small looking glass lay abandoned at her feet.

If she heard him approach, she made no effort to greet him, or hide that she was crying until he kneeled before her, the fire warm at his back.

Valethen took in a deep shuddering breath before saying, quite pitifully, “I didn’t mean to wake you.” Her jewel green eyes were rimmed red and fresh tears slid over sun-darkened cheeks.

“What troubles you, Val?” Thom asked while wiping a tear away with the pad of his thumb. He rested his other hand gently on her knee.

“It is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever cried over,” Val mumbled darkly in reply.

“I don’t believe it’s possible for you to cry over anything that is not worth crying over. Tell me.”

Val chewed on her lip, made a heroic effort to gather her composure, only to drop it entirely. “It’s my hair,” she sobbed and choked on a fresh wave of tears. “I haven’t been able to braid it since I lost my arm. I thought I might be able to figure it out with it wet, but …” her voice trailed away and she cast her eyes down to the mirror by her bare feet.

She had lost so much of herself already. To see her shattered and pulled apart in this way sat heavy and burning in his chest.

Valethen looked at him with tired, questing eyes. She held her breath as though she waited for him to laugh, or chide her for being ridiculous.

Thom leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to her tear-soaked cheek. He felt her sigh, releasing the defensive wall she frequently erected in front of her heart to the gentle breeze. “If it’s a braid you want, Val, then a braid you’ll get,” he said softly with his forehead pressed to hers.

He was rewarded by the small smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth, the sparkle in her eyes as she pulled her head back to regard him with mock suspicion. “Thom Rainier, if you are about to tell me that you were once a hair stylist at a premier Orlesian salon, I shall have to send you away. That is a secret that is a bridge too far!” There was a hint of musical laughter hidden in her words, barely audible beneath her breath still hitched with tears.

“We all have our secrets, Val,” he teased with a cocked eyebrow. When she snorted and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, he added, “Sadly, I have never braided anything a day in my life. I make no promises as to the quality of my craftsmanship.” Thom stood and helped Valethen to shift so that she was sitting in the spot where he had just been kneeling. He settled in on the canvas stool behind her. “How have you been out here without anything on your feet? I half expect you wouldn’t feel your own toes by now.”

“Ancient elven secrets,” Valethen answered with a shrug. After a second or two of pointed silence, indicated that he wasn’t buying the lie she was selling, Val cupped her hand and breathed into it, speaking quiet words which seemed to form into a golden, glowing mass in the palm of her hand. She placed her hand on the ground next to her, and Thom felt the earth beneath his feet begin to warm. “I can cast a fireball large enough to rival one of Cullen’s trebuchet projectiles. I think I could keep my feet warm for a couple of hours.”

“All of that time freezing my bits off in the mountains, and here you had the solution in the palm of your devious little hands,” he groused playfully as he carefully separated her hair into three separate strands. “I know you heard us complaining.”

“If only any of you had thought to ask me to warm your socks for you.”

A comfortable silence fell over them as Thom worked to tame Valethen’s hair into something that sort of resembled the neat braid he had always seen her wearing before. Valethen hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on top of them. “He used to call me “Little Halla,” she whispered to the embers remaining on the fire. “Cyrion, I mean.”

“Halla are majestic creatures,” Thom reasoned, careful not to say too much, afraid that one wrong word would have her sewing herself up in her shroud of secrets and memories. The pieces of her she rarely spoke out loud for fear that the wind would take them away forever.

Valethen shook her head lightly. “Halla are temperamental animals. Beautiful, to be certain. The halla-tenders all say that they will only carry our aravels when asked kindly. And even then, if they are unhappy, they’ll refuse.” She lifted her hand to offer Thom the leather chord hanging between her fingers. “Cyrion, may his soul be at rest, called me such because I am hopelessly stubborn. It was his little joke.”

He couldn’t help but agree. Valethen was quite stubborn, though he might have compared her to an ornery mule, but that was far less poetic and far more likely to end with him knocked flat on his ass by one of Val’s great earthen projectiles for saying so. Thom settled on saying, “He was a wise man, then. You miss him.”

“His memory has always walked with me, but old wounds are torn open with new.” Valethen sighed, straightening her shoulders before saying, “I can almost hear him chastising me because I still haven’t learned to ask for help when I need it. Even a halla knows to tell the tender when it’s ill or in pain. I’m afraid I’m more like a particularly recalcitrant cat, who hides its wounds until they fester and can’t be hidden any longer.”

Thom squeezed her shoulder reassuringly, “Cat or halla, I don’t think anyone could rightly blame you for it, all things considered.” He draped the finished braid over her shoulder for her to inspect.

Valethen tenderly picked up the braid, looking over what she could see and feeling the rest of it to the back of her head. It was uneven, the pattern skipped here and there. Overall, a terrible braid. “Oh, it’s positively awful,” she said with a laugh. “Thank you, Thom. I feel much better.”

Thom smiled before pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Next time, you need only ask.”

“I will try."

[timethehobo]

Mostly on side quests atm and dragging him everywhere cos he’s such a sweetheart.

[too-many-lavellans]

Rook thoughts, commence

[an-established-butt-dent]

Dragon age inquisition: Solas

I wonder how long it took the companions to notice Solas wields magic just a bit... differently?

Surely an apostate knows magic beyond the boundaries of a Circle? But even Dorian doesn't recognize some of his techniques, and the ones that he does are only described in ancient Tevene tomes.

Hmm... strange.

Acrylic ink, fineliner and gouache on paper.

[lizzybeeee]

Me watching my Inquisitor walk off with Solas at the end of the game like :) "aw cute ..hey if Mythal hadn't told you to stop would you have murdered her,," (I haven't played the other endings yet).

This!!!

(Obviously, not murdered her personally, but he absolutely had no qualms about doing the ritual once more - knowing the consequences of it.)

Let me preempt this by saying that I wanted there to be a happy/fulfilling ending to Solas and Lavellan. I'm not a blind hater! Just someone who finds it very hard to put my own Lavellan in the place of the 'Lavellan' provided to us in DATV.

The Solas/Lavellan relationship already was kind of iffy (power imbalance, constantly dragging her culture, removing her vallaslin/then dumping her, constantly lying to her, etc...) but DAI did a great job of making you feel sympathetic towards his plight - especially after Trespasser! He woke up in a world so divorced from his own that it was unrecognizable - the people he had done so much for were suffering from the consequences of his actions, justified as they may have been at the time (stopping the evanuris). His actions led to great suffering in the pursuit of preventing even greater suffering.

Even after we learned of his plans in Trespasser, it was very much: "cool motive, still murder."

I felt sympathetic towards Solas and the implication that we could change his mind, given to us in Trespasser, gave me hope that we would be able to convince him of another path. That he could find a place in Thedas as it is now and look to the future. That was why I chose the option to try and get through to Solas, despite knowing that his plan would lead to mass death/terror if it went ahead.

I always expected the Veil to fall at some point, but i was hoping there'd be some more nuance to it than: veil gone, demons everywhere, lots of people die. Well, I was very wrong lmao.

But, if anything, the game made me entirely unsympathetic towards Solas.

The moment he started his ritual he chose the old elven empire over Lavellan - over her family, friends, home, culture, and anything else she may have loved/valued.

And he did this twice.

He chose to pursue lowering the Veil - knowing that thousands would likely die. For all his insistence of 'minimizing the damage' he went in knowing that many more people would die because of his actions. There was no justification of stopping the evanuris this time either - no excuse of not knowing the potential consequences of his actions like the first time.

He chose to begin the ritual that ended up releasing the Elven Gods - knowing full well the risks it entailed.

He killed Varric - whether by accident or not, it was by his hand.

He chose to use blood magic to manipulate Rook into thinking that Varric was alive - puppeting his corpse around in Rook's eyes and putting his words into Varric's mouth.

He chose to manipulate, mold, and guilt Rook into the old 'switcheroo' in his mind palace/regret prison

He chose to 'free' the elven people by bringing down the Veil - regardless of their feelings about it (elven Rook can call him out on this!), never mind the consequences or ramifications of a bunch of people suddenly having their bodily autonomy overwritten by now being magic/having immortality.

He looked at the devastation caused the by the Gods and still went ahead with trying to bring down the veil again.

These are the thing he does in-game - not even mentioning making the dwarves/titans tranquil, creating the blight, started the chain of events that led to SOUTHERN THEDAS BEING DESTROYED, and taking my good gear from Inquisition!

Aside from the 'all lore leads to Solas' reveal just being really dull it also does nothing to help with making me sympathetic to him as a character. The audacity of this man to say: "it was like walking in a world of tranquil" when he fucking lobotomized the dwarves/titans is wild in retrospect.

If he didn't do the ritual at the beginning, if something else went wrong and that resulted in the God's being released, I could understand why a Lavellan would still want to get through to him. It would make sense - she could stop him from doing it again at the end too! You can still have him conflicted and torn between the restoring the past or pursuing the future - but this doesn't happen!

He never chose Lavellan in this game! Hell, it's Mythal who convinces him to stop?!! He owes her nothing! He's learned nothing from this!!! He's only stopped because Mythal 'pardoned/freed' him - once again showing that he values the ancient elves/mythal over her!!!

How impactful would it have been to have him choose Lavellan over Mythal! To show us this! Mythal, who 'crawled through the ages for a reckoning' (which was retconned to her being sad about the elves lmao) telling Solas to go through with the ritual and him touching grass and saying 'no'.

It's something I feel was wildly out of character for him as well - he never came across in DAI as being subservient to Mythal, if anything the ending cutscene gave me the impression they were equals?!

After everything he did in this game - after all we learn about what he did in the past - I had no interest in reasoning/appealing with his ass. None whatsoever. My inquisitor/Lavellan asking if Solas can be reasoned with only made me regret making that choice - perhaps other people's inquisitor's would say that, but mine would not, especially after everything that happened in game.

She came across as delusional: standing on the ruins of a blighted Minrathous, the south blighted to hell, dead all around them, blight tentacles everywhere, a gaping hole in the Fade right next to them:

Lavellan: "I forgive you! All you have to do is stop." Solas: "But I cannot."

Boom! There it is.

At this point it's not romantic, it's just sad! Sad that she's spent 10 years pining after a man who seemed to learn nothing at all from what happened in DAI.

------------------------

There should have been some sort of a dialogue option with Lavellan right before you go into the big fight - she can ask you what you think of Solas, if he's truly regretful for everything that happened, and then you can give her an answer that can 'change' her approach to Solas in the end - giving the player some agency as to how their Inquisitor would actually respond to this.

Ending One: Bye Bye Bye

Rook: "HE'S A GUY."

alternatively, "Look around you! Look at what Solas has done - what he's threatening to do even now after all of this! You gave him every chance to turn away from this path. So did Varric...and look at what he did!"

Lavellan is bitter/angry with Solas: "It seems we never were people to you after all."

Refers to him as 'Fen'harel' and not Solas - dig the knife in deeper, give us angst!

"Just go. You love the Fade, don't you? Enough to do all this - enough to kill Varric for your pride in a dead world that no longer exists. We were never 'real' to you, were we?"

Solas says his goodbyes, expresses his love, and Lavellan steps back.

Solas leaves voluntarily, his 'situation-ship very much over', to stew in his regrets for the rest of his life.

Ending Two: Bittersweet Goodbye

Rook: "Girl, it's been 10 years."

alternatively, "You loved him once, perhaps you still do even now - after all he's done - but love wasn't enough. Love does not excuse this."

Lavellan is firm with Solas, does not excuse his actions, but has a bitter sweet farewell: "I had hoped…it doesn't matter what I hoped. You made your choice - it wasn't me. It wasn't our friends. It wasn't this world. You can make a choice now - if I ever mattered you. If I, if our friends, were ever real to you."

They can have a final goodbye, a goodbye smooch, and then he can go off to the Fade.

Bittersweet ending - acknowledge what they had and then provide closure.

Ending Three: Happy Ending (?)

Rook: "He didn't mean it babe. He's tots sorry."

alternatively, "He seems to regret what's happened - I've seen his memories, his regrets. He believes this is the only path he has. Perhaps you can convince him to find another."

Default Lavellan ending basically

"There is no fate but the love we share" blah blah blah

As happy an ending as it can be when you have Lavellan fuck off to the Fade - leaving behind her life, friends, family, and whatever remains of the world for an eternity.

I'm being mean but I genuinely wanted a happy/fulfilling ending for them both too - despite the fact that this game seems to want that ending as well, it did little to convince me of that. :(

I genuinely liked Solas in DAI - despite his flaws, I thought his romance was compelling and I was hoping to be able to convince him to change/alter his path. I can see what they were trying to do with him in DATV but it's so hard to feel sympathy for him when we see/know the results of his actions. The story in this game is doing anything but convincing me to give him a 'happy ending'.

'Love' can't excuse what he did and neither would my Lavellan.

Also RIP Sandal's Prophecy about the Fade lmao

[hauntedgarden95]

idk maybe rook getting kidnapped by elgar’nan would have fixed me

[plifpliff]

Veil

my fave parts: scales! faces! (boi did I make a lot of progress on this part) that one part of the sword !

[chromunist]

Long POSITIVE rant/analysis about Veilgards plot regarding Solas for me and anyone else bummed out by everyone saying the writing is bad!

SPOILERS

All that I wanted going into this game was to get to know solas as the dread wolf and get my big solavellan moment. The game delivered. This game is very much, by design, the dread wolf’s where inquisition is solas’. In inquisition he is hiding and allowed to be himself as a result, by the end of it you don't change his mind, but you make it so he no longer wants to tear down the veil, not on a personal level. Solas is sensitive, kind and wise. The dread wolf is cut throat, pragmatic and prideful. To save him you need to tap into the person from inquisition, not the god from veilgard.

The thing about solas’ mission is that on a pragmatic level he is right. Rip off the bandaid of these short mortal lives and generate a utopia of immortals. That's why pragmatism doesn’t save him. He needs to accept that on an emotional level, as a person, he doesn’t want to destroy this world, he doesn’t want to fight anymore, and he can never truly make his sacrifices mean something, he can never make any of it worth it because it will never feel worth it to him. He needs to choose to stop as a person not a god of rebellion or spirit of wisdom. Because no matter how much he didnt want to be a god, he acted like one and he can never be at peace while doing so. And no matter how much he wishes he was still a spirit, he’s not. Veilgard at the end of the day was about accepting that you will make choices you will regret, there will be uncomfortable consequences to your actions and there won't always be meaning in those consequences. You can choose to punish yourself forever (solas) or accept the uncomfortable truth that you can't punish yourself into peace and forgive yourself (rook).

The reason why one of you companions must die is so that you cannot be placed above solas. This is also why you must pick minrathous or treviso. You must walk a path like his, fight the war he fought and make the sacrifices he made. You cannot defeat solas or change him on the pretense of being better than him, of not being willing to make sacrifices like him, You MUST make sacrifices, You must put people who follow you into situations where you know they might die and when, not if, they do, you must live with the regret that comes with it.

Solas knew that eventually someone would die under your command and he waited for that moment because you would be faced with the same kind of regret as him and then you would be able to take his place. You don't get to act like you are better than him because you never abandoned anyone, you don't get to act like you are better than him because you never ordered someone to their likely demise. Because you did. You cant get solas to stop by making the claim that he is wrong and you are right, because he isn't. You’re the same. Rook is a foil to solas

The dinanshiral for him is continuing to walk the path that only makes him hate himself more. that he doesn’t feel good about or want to do. He wants to stop but he can no longer see the line between his pride and wisdom. He wants to keep walking it because he can't let go of the fight and accept that this is what all his sacrifices will amount to. He knows he will only hate himself more at the end of the journey but he thinks he deserves to feel all that guilt and shame if it means bringing about the utopia he imagines. He sees the regret and pain of making this ideal world as a burden only he can bear and therefore has a responsibility to take on. He fails if he doesn’t he is selfish if he doesn’t because the sacrifices hes made and the elves of now (in his eyes deluded by idealism) deserve the world he is trying to create

It’s not that solas can't accept he did bad things. He’s great at that actually. He can't accept that he did bad things and those things might never matter. He took risks and lost and there is no reward that can make him feel like it was worth it, but he's trying to make it feel worth it by continuing his plans. He cant accept that he acted like a god, created this deeply flawed world, and cant fix it. He sees himself as the only one who can save his people and cant accept the reality that he failed at preserving one thing he always wanted to preserve. After millennia of fighting and sacrificing for it, how does he just stop? Just because he wants to? That’s selfish. He can take the pain, he deserves it even. So why not keep going? He has to do it, someone else might get it wrong (haha).

Rook is freed because they listen to the people who love them, accept forgiveness from those they hurt, and the reality of their guilt. But choose not to hate themselves anyways.

You show him it's okay to stop. He's not failing. You make him accept his pain and his mistake. You mythal and the inquisitor give him the permission to end, to be forgiven so he can finally give himself the release from that ancient duty. The acceptance of the grim reality he wrought as real and permanent and he doesn’t need to honor those sacrifices because doing so will still never change the reality of how they make him feel. He finally gets to live as a hurt and flawed man, not a savior with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I think thats a beautiful and perfect ending for him, and the whole plot of veilgard is to build rook up into this dichotomy with him.

Solas pretty much says he made you into him, but he didn’t anticipate you’d be able to forgive yourself. Because forgiveness is something he cant imagine granting himself until the end, when he is met with genuine compassion and understanding by those he hurt.

[roocharfferarts]

I ended up really liking my inquisitor this round of DA play throughs, and so I wanted to do a tarot card for him, the poor guy. I just like, ugh, idk, the man had it rough. i think a lot about how it must feel to be a dalish inquisitor (especially one chained to the well) going through the events at the end of the inquisition and just struggling with everything they're learning about the evanuris and auuugh

[definitelynotadeathclaw]

People in thedas discrediting mages like most of our heros, hawkes, and inquisitors aren't mages (seems to be sometimes and I'm here for it)

[timethehobo]

Another what-if pair. They’d be a cute research couple discovering ancient elven artefacts and learning how they led their lives (and deaths).

[crossdressingdeath]

I feel like the "strong reason" Rook has for not getting involved with blood magic is probably to do with the situation rather than personal beliefs or feelings (or at least it should be, especially given what happened with Hawke I don't particularly want Bioware making decisions about how my character feels about blood magic for me), but at the same time. Blood magic trauma... blood magic trauma would be so fun...

[nadas-dirthalen]

let me tell you, there has never been a to-do list more powerful than the Pre-Veilguard Tasks presently sitting on my desk calendar

[singingkestrel]

I am in love with Treviso.

[andrastes-cheeks]

He’s sick and he’s tired BUT he is serving

[aquamonstra]

“Highbloods. You just can’t help what you think about the rest of us, can you?” The words rang in his ears as he left the pawn shop. Rain had started to patter down over Glandivalis Square, refilling the potholes and divots in the cobblestone road that had barely dried out from that morning, and further dampening Tarquin’s mood. His conversation with Rook had helped to calm his ire at Ashur, but now it was replaced with guilt at how he’d snapped at his friend. His friend... Was that even the right word? ___ Or, what happens when Tarquin and Ashur actually compete to see who can say sorry better.