#the fuck does she know about the dalish gods or tevinter history or the fade or magic beyond the bare minimum

[martyrmarked]

sidri becomes aware all but immediately after the start of inquisition how little she knows of a vast, intricate world and while she may not always get the words quite right, or at least as precise as she urgently wishes them to be, she's always sincere and respectful and that does come across.

[aarongoldenwrites]

Alright. Get ready for a trip. I'm gonna go point by point through this because I'm obsessed with these games, I dig the real world connotations, and the new trailer just dropped and I haven't played any DA since the flood. So...

We need to start with a discussion of Solas in general. He's Fen'Harel, the Dread Wolf. He fought against institutionalized and systemic slavery, freed his people, and fought alone against corrupt being powerful enough to be considered gods (and they are the old gods of the Tevinter Imperium, I believe, but that's a whole other thing). He created the veil and imprisoned the gods, possibly in Black City, and doing so nearly killed him and sent him into a thousand year coma. He didn't understand the consequences of his actions, but he trusted people enough not to mess it up further.

And then he woke up.

Let us start with the Qun. The Qun is fascism. Individual Qunari are fascinating individuals, especially when they are removed from the Qun as a whole – Sten and the Iron Bull being our prime examples. But everything we know about them paints them as fanatics that torture mages and lobotomize anyone that doesn't accept their philosophy. Their entire culture is systemic slavery, which is the very thing Solas opposed. Of course he hates them.

There's two instances that can change his mind: one is a possible Qunari Inquisitor, but your Inquisitor is Vashoth (edit 2020/09/03: as noted by @felassan -- thanks!), someone who was never part of the Qun. He's not been awake long enough to see it, and it shocks him out of binary thinking. He's apologizing badly, because he's personally a social disaster who doesn't know how to people (and we'll get to that). The second is if you choose to save the Chargers; Solas turns around on the Bull instantly, shows genuine concern towards him, and helps him deal with Fade-related PTSD.

In fact, all he ever wants to do is teach. If he comes out and says he's Fen'Harel people are going to assume he's a crackpot, but I think Solas, as a persona, is actually who he is. He jokes with the Bull and Blackwall about his Fade knowledge, and offers them both knowledge on how to kill fade spirits more efficiently. All three of them respect one another as soldiers. He compares knowledge of magic and history with Dorian, Cassandra seeks his opinion on organization and faith, Josephine appreciates his insight, Leliana asks his advice, and Varric and he chatter and shoot the shit.

He constantly tries to teach or learn. The only two people he has issues with are Sera and Vivienne, and even there he tries to offer advice and wisdom as best he's able. Sera can't stand him because she hates elves, and Viv is a victim of the Circle and can't imagine a world without an entrenched power structure, regardless of how many people it hurts.

And I suppose that's a thing a lot of people have trouble with when it comes to Solas: he tells you straight out at the end of Trespasser that he's going to tear down the Veil and destroy the world as we know it. And that's terrible. That's destroying a world state and trying to return thing to how they were, kind of like how the Inquisitor and Dorian reset time in Redcliffe. I mean, that world was a hellscape where everything you ever cared about was dead or corrupted, and fixing it was the right call. It's not at all like how the world Solas wakes up to is a hellscape where everything he ever cared about was dead or corrupted. Fixing it is the right call?

And we could argue that the future that we averted was a monstrous place, but how does Solas see his own world? His people worship the slavers he defeated and die with a terrible frequency. Elves die and face fates that are about as terrible as that faced by mages; he's fucked coming and going. And we know he went to the Dalish and tried to talk to them and they attacked him. Why wouldn't they? He knows about what's happening outside of the Plato's cave that the Dalish are dying in.

His actions are going to kill thousands. His actions are going to save millions. The Dalish are dying in droves and the city elves are going to follow. Giving them a fighting chance at survival means reminding them who they are.

He also tells us that waking up was like “swimming in tranquil”. I think creating the Veil crippled the elves in some way, and he's not trying to give them magic so much as he's trying to heal them of a disease he inadvertently created. And while I know it's hard to take him at his word, it shouldn't be: he lies by omission once (about being Fen'harel, as we've covered the reasons why already), and lies directly twice.

After Orlais, he talks about how much he missed intrigue and court. If you ask him about this, he stumbles and you get disapproval – the only time you get disapproval for asking him a question. He lets his guard down around you and still doesn't know what to do.

The last time is in Crestwood and only happens if you romance him. He's about to tell you who he is and he chickens out and tells you about the slave marks on your face instead. Because – and this is the important thing – he cares. He's viciously selfless; he doesn't believe he deserves happiness and he can't imagine a world where he can save his people and be happy.

Make no mistake: the elves are threatened with extinction with the world as it is. The city elves in Origins are blamed when they react to some of their number being raped and killed by human nobles. The Dalish in Origins can be wiped out by the werewolves. The Dalish in Awakening are wiped out regardless of what you do. The Dalish in DA2 can be wiped out in Act 3. The city elves in Kirkwall are hunted for sport, see their children kidnapped and raped before being murdered, are locked away and left to burn whenever there's any problem at all. Three different Dalish clans can be wiped out in Inquisition, and it's so easy for Lavellen to lose her clan.

The status quo is killing the elves. It is wiping them out. This is an existential threat that no one is doing anything about, except Solas.

He's also lonely.

He says he was derided by his enemies also when he offered to share his knowledge of the Fade. We took this to mean the Dalish before Trespasser, but given who he is, we can speculate that he's talking about the old elven gods. But if his enemies derided them, that means his allies did, too. His old allies still saw him as a madman and a fool, probably because he was one man standing against an empire. He clearly couldn't trust anyone in the old days, and even tells Sera he had to sacrifice some of those closest to him for fear of betrayal.

Consider that the Inquisition was the first time he had friends. No one knows him as anything other than the elven apostate hobo with bad fashion sense and a weird relationship with spirits, but, as mentioned, he has mostly good relationships with everyone. People rely on him. They like him. Lavellan potentially loves him, and he loves her.

You change his mind on the Qunari race (but not their culture). You show him that he was wrong and he accepts that with good grace and moves on; he keeps coming to the Inquisitor afterwards because he respects you and he does not want to do what he sees as the only way to avoid genocide. I don't think he ever stops feeling bad about any of the things he's gotten wrong; he wears his mistakes like a chain and tries to do better, never stops trying to do better, but his perspective and capability are so much greater than anything the Warden, the Champion, or even the Inquisitor currently understands.

And I wouldn't be surprised if we get a chance to fold him back into the party at some point. I think the actual villain of the series lies with the monsters the Evanuris fought against and were corrupted by.

I think the actual villains are the Forgotten Ones, and I think they are the Blight, and I think they are what lies in the corruption we know as Red Lyrium.      

[thesswrites]

Dragon Age: The Black City

Recently, I’ve been playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition again. While a review will not be forthcoming except by inference, I can say that countless hours of fetch quests are good for one thing - providing time for contemplation of various plot elements that, perhaps unfortunately, tend to get lost in a narrative being forced to spread itself thin against an open world landscape. Some of this does touch on the Trespasser DLC, and is yet another reason why said DLC should have been core content, given how integral it is to the story as a whole.

Summary (keeping in mind that my personal statute of limitations on spoilers is ‘when the DVD comes out’ for movies, three months for TV shows, books and video games) - we discover at the end of Trespasser that the Fade, previously considered the seat of the Maker among other things, is actually a whole section of world locked away by Fen’harel in order to stop his fellow evanuris (worshipped as gods, but not technically gods) from being asshats. This destroyed his world and basically made a whole mess of everything. Trespasser is probably considered DLC because it appears to set up the next game, despite the fact that it’s integral for comprehension of the plot of this one, because the entire plot of Inquisition involves one of the early magisters trying to go meet the Maker in His Golden City and, according to history, starting the Blights. History tells us that the Blights began because the Maker was punishing those early magisters for their hubris, which among other things turned the Golden City into the Black City.

But Corypheus - albeit not the most reliable narrator in the world - claims that the Golden City was never golden to begin with; that it was black and dark and empty.

There are a few things to note here:

Tevinter has seven Old Gods.

Tevinter Old Gods are ‘sleeping beneath the earth’, getting tainted or already so, before being dug up by darkspawn to become archdemons.

In the Dalish pantheon, the last remaining bastion of worship for those ancient Dalish mages who styled themselves gods, there were nine.

Mythal was already in the material plane, in one form or another, as was Fen’harel.

That leaves seven.

If you start Inquisition with a timeline that includes your Warden participating in or agreeing to the Dark Ritual, Flemeth / Mythal does a similar sort of thing to Kieran as Solas did to her after the end credits, just without the disintegration that we see in his wisdom-spirit friend.

The Dark Ritual, recall, was ostensibly to cleanse the Old God’s soul of the taint without destroying it. What Solas did to his wisdom-spirit friend was to free its essence to return in some other form, that hadn’t seen demonic corruption

Fen’harel basically hated each and every one of his fellow evanuris with the exception of Mythal. He hated most of them because they killed Mythal.

Mythal is a dead evanuris, which arguably makes Flemeth / Mythal a spirit having taken a human shape, like Cole. (Certainly explains the phylactery thing, and why she was never planning to possess Morrigan, and why she could apparently body-swap; it’s possible that she is the actual answer to Dorian’s question to Cole about “Could you change what you look like, if you wanted to?”. Also explains why Flemeth looks human, when you’d think she should look elven. Humans blend in better, after all. Also explains...)

Mythal / Flemeth can turn into a fucking dragon. What is the standard form of an archdemon / Old God?

Fen’harel is a vindictive asshole. Possibly not without reason, but a vindictive asshole all the same, with a very single-minded view of what is right and how to avenge perceived wrongs.

So here’s the theory:

Solas didn’t only orchestrate the opening of the Breach in order to try to return the world to what he thinks it should be. Solas as Fen’harel started the Blight in the first place.

Consider: locking away the evanuris and his entire world was a pretty drastic move, but he keeps talking about it like he had to, but when he says it, he sounds like he did when he was discussing his reasons for seeing the Breach sealed in the first place. It’s the vocal tone that says "This is my problem and while I’ll be damned if I admit to having done it, I’ll handle the consequences”.

Also consider his reaction if you don’t exile the Wardens after Adamant. Sure, they were enslaving ‘spirits’, but that was down to Erimond, and with the fear demon dead, no more false Calling to give them problems. There has got to be another reason that he’s not really big on Wardens. They end Blights, the Wardens. They do it by killing Old Gods. Fen’harel is a man who believes that people should suffer for all eternity for their wrongs, if his policy of “locking them all away from the world forever” is any indication. Not to mention the fact that, as well as ending Blights, Wardens also research them. If, say, there was evidence linking Solas to Fen’harel to the Old Gods to the Blights, it’d be a Warden who’d find it. He’d want those nosy bastards as far away from the Inquisition as possible at that point.

In addition to that, there’s the fact that Corypheus found the so-called Golden City black and tainted already. There were legends, probably put together from old fragments of story and documents left behind by the evanuris, talking about what their world used to look like before Fen’harel brought up the Veil. Solas did say when the Anchor is brought up that Tevinter built a lot of itself on very ancient elven magics, the same way that Orlais built a lot of itself upon ancient elven land. So they hear about this Golden City and they go looking for it. Now, if the Blight kicked in immediately upon the raising of the Veil, whether as a separate curse or a direct result of the Veil, there wouldn’t be any record of that left behind because everyone who would have written about it is far on the other side of the Veil. And dreams don’t necessarily show you the truth, as Solas has proved on a couple of occasions - it’s all about perception, the Fade in dreams. It’s only when you go through physically that you see the truth of it, so while Tevinter Somniari might dream of the Golden City, it’s still only their perceptions, or those of the people whose dreams they’re sharing. But if they didn’t know that, Somniari reports of a Golden City as seen in the dreams of those who expected one ... well. That would just make the experiment to physically cross the Veil more appealing.

So when Corypheus and his ilk cross the Veil, they see the tainted Black City and, unwittingly and probably unknowingly, unleash their own Old Gods into the material plane. They bring the Blight with them but, because they’re tired and sick and have been locked away so much, they find nice cozy places to rest in the Deep Roads and beneath until their ‘new worshippers’ dig them up to wreak havoc.

This also, in a sense, explains red lyrium. You go down deep enough, you encounter the hearts of Titans. Those hearts seem to beat lyrium, and may be the source of the entire world’s lyrium supply (and before you say anything, consider how much blood a human being can lose before falling unconscious, then consider a largely immobile creature the approximate size of a country. Blood is self-regenerating, and there’s plenty to go around). You bring a Blighted evanuris in a really big dragon shape down deep enough ... well, the Blight sings, and so does lyrium. Sometimes when you add one song to another, dissonant unpleasantness is the result. Either way, proximity can equal taint. Hence, red lyrium.

Side note: this may also explain why the dwarves severed themselves from ‘the song of the Stone’ - as a defense mechanism. Obviously doesn’t work with prolonged proximity - Bartrand was proof of that - but if the dwarves just stopped hearing the song of lyrium altogether, that would include at least part of the red lyrium song, and combine that with the distancing of themselves from it by, say, abandoning thaigs that were crawling with darkspawn ... no proximity, no sensitivity to lyrium, not being able to be affected by lyrium easily... It’s the only way you could live down there with a Blight percolating like good coffee and not very quickly become the kind of first wave of harbinger that would destroy the world all on your own.

This doesn’t entirely explain what Solas has to gain from tearing the Veil down again. Maybe he’s entirely fixated on restoring his world to what it should be, but he also might be trying to cover up the massive balls-up caused by the magisters who physically crossed the Veil. The Blights may be almost done owing to five evanuris / Old Gods / whatever, but red lyrium is still a problem. Just tearing the Veil down may not solve the problem entirely, but if there was going to be any indication of how to un-Blight things, it would probably be in the place where the Blight originated, rather than where it just turned up. Maybe he wants to put the status quo back together so that he can rebuild the libraries and all the wisdom, and maybe cleanse the Blight for good. Because, you know ... directly or indirectly his fault it happened in the first place.

This is just one theory, mind, and while I have my reasons for believing that Bioware might not survive to make Dragon Age 4, I accept that this may not be ... shocking twist enough to be the actual answer (because unfortunately, shock value trumps Holmesian deduction way too often these days). Still, this is my logically considered headcanon for why the fuck this bullshit is happening in the first place.

[elvesofnoldor]

kinda went off the rail yesterday and made a dragon age elf oc called Micah, who is based on gwindor and I plan this elf’s story into finley lavellan’s story arc in inquisition and now i decided that after my lavellan and dorian breaks up one year post-trespasser in this fanfic arc i planned for them, they aren’t gonna get back together by the end of the fic. instead, my lavellan is gonna keep taking a break from this relationship and im gonna leave it open like that. like, im not sure if i wanna ship my lavellan with this Micah (whom i actually really love right now), but lavellan x dorian is making less and less sense the more i think about it. And honestly, i dont think any sort of development dorian can have would change anything substantially.

i always have a rough time writing lavellan x dorian, cause the fact that dorian is tevinter, the fact that he shares kinship with slavers and slave owners is just always fucking ridiculous on its own. And given that lavellan is an elf in dragon age universe and there is this history of tevinters enslaving his ancestors and enacting literal and cultural genocide against his people, i always have a hard time justifying lavellan falling in love with dorian and im pretty sure other ppl has that problem too. Also, even though dorian is the head of his house now, we still dont know if he dismisses the goddamn slaves his parents owned, so there is also this bullshit. Then there is dorian “i almost definitely slept with elven sex slaves in the elven slums--who are either socially marginalized people forced into sex work or victims of sex trafficking” pavus talking about how slavery isn’t that bad in tevinter, and then turn around and wax poetic about how same-gender relationships aren’t meant to be about love in tevinter wah wah wah. Anybody who read the codex entry on tevinter culture in da:i knows that same-gender relationships are only frowned upon in tevinter imperium when it disrupts the cis-heterosexual political marriages between noble mage houses, same-gender sex and relationships are in fact ENCOURAGED in tevinter when it happens between slave owners and their slaves. so yeah, i said dorian has never been a fucking victim before, well, this is why. sexuality and class privilege/oppression are intertwined in real world and in fictional universes that mirrored the real world and believe or not, being the top of social hierarchy means dorian got the better end of the bargain. he said, oh, “anything between two men, it’s about pleasure”. yeah, specifically a slaver owner’s pleasure in violating and further dehumanizing a person lol!!! but sure dorian you are so fucking oppressed.  im just. i have been wary before, of dorian. because of this slavery thing, and i never really talked abt why. and im just. i am even more wary now. and i still like dorian i guess, but, lmao. i just can’t make lavellan and dorian some sort of great love story, cause it really ain’t one. lavellan fell in love with dorian cause i insisted on having romance interests in every single one of my dragon age playthroughs--especially when it’s a canon one, but honestly he really shouldn’t have. in my fic, they broke up cause  finley lavellan knew dorian used to whore around in tevinter’s elven slums/alienages, and someone lied to lavellan and said that dorian is still doing that with lavellan living at his estate, and even though lavellan knew abt the truth later, he still felt gross about sharing a bed with someone who slept with potential victims of sex trafficking, so, they are taking a break for now. it’s just bad ok, lavellan is also in the right, ok. fuck knows whats gonna happen in da4, i doubt it’d change anything--and that’s speaking on the pretence that dorian will even be involved in da4.  i have this headcanon abt lavellan crafting a pair of rings for him and dorian in his forge as their engagement rings, i will retain that headcanon about the engagement rings, but the ring might not be for dorian.  anyways this is elf oc is based on gwindor, and gwindor’s story is that he was an elven lord (presumably a noldor elf) of hidden kingdom of nagathrond, and he was a valiant and fierce warrior who literally charged inside The Devil Himself (morgoth)’s stronghold with his company after his little brother was brutally executed (god. poor gelmlir) in front of the elven host, unfortunately for him, everybody in his company is killed and he alone was captured and enslaved and forced to work in morgoth’s mine for 14 years. apparently during the 14 years, he was “mutilated”, his hair turned grey during the process, and the experience “sapped his strength” (i think it’s like, spiritual strength, cause it seems elves in tolkien universe draws strength and power of all kinds from their fea aka their spirit). he eventually escaped and he lost his hand in the process, and almost died from losing the goddamn hand, but then he got rescued by another elf. BUT this elf (beleg) got accidentally stabbed to death by his disaster of a human best friend soon after. And gwindor, who’s already dealing with a truck load of trauma himself, was kind enough to comfort and and guide this disaster human dude (who went in shock cause he can’t accept what he did with his own damn hands) and brought him to nagthrond aka his home. but when gwindor needed love and support the most from his loved ones, they all stop listening to him and he lost his previous influence on his people and nobody is there to help him through his trauma, and he ended up feeling like he’s unfit to be loved, which is bullshit. eventually this disaster human dude’s dumbass advice got him and everybody he loved killed. And i was like it’s pretty bullshit that this obviously traumatized character is ostracized from his community for being traumatized, instead of getting the love and support he deserves and i said thats bullshit because in this house traumatized people get to have live happily ever after. so my desire to make gwindor happy inspires the creation of this elf oc.  now dragon age elves can’t really be lords or ladies or prince or princess, but the keeper and the keeper’s children are usually descendants of the elven nobilities of the dales, so, that should be close enough. Also i want more dalish mage characters anyways. This elf oc is a dalish mage, his name is Micah and he’s the First of his clan, as matter of fact. I wouldn’t say he’s exactly like merrill, but he does have merrill’s hair colour (dark raven hair but his hair is long), merrill’s eyes (more hazel than just green, but yeah) and merrill’s skin tone (light/pale). he’s also the more studio type, like merrill, and has a more bubbly personality than either of my lavellans. This dalish mage used to love the fade, and he loved the ancient songs he witnessed in the fade the most. Micah also has a beautiful voice and he’s very good at singing and he always carries a little lute with him to accompany his tunes. When he’s not nose deep in tomes about spells and magical theories and ancient texts, he’s out singing in the woods with his lute--he only performs in front of his family or his closest childhood friends since he’s not a people person. While finley lavellan has this appearance of gentleness, he can be quite ruthless and cold. And lavellan is more of a natural leader type of person. Micah, on the other hand, is truly a soft and gentle soul and is really not the kind to truly be a leader of any kind. 

so what happened is that, Micah is from a clan that’s always travelling around ferelden. they settled around denerium when the fifth blight broke out (that was events of da:o), but specifically he went to the denerium alienage to trade some goods with the shop keepers at least two weeks prior to the warden’s arrival at the alienage. However, he noticed the presences of the tevinters, become worried for the alienage’s safety since he suspects these are slavers, and he’s locked in the quarantine inside because of the spread of the plague. shianni found him trying to warn the sick alienage residents and shared her concern, but at the time shianni is just suspicious and not openly oppose to the tevinters’ presences. now in da:o, im pretty sure if you are an elf warden at least, you can feign sickness and get “admitted” in, but then you’d get stripped of your belongings and had to fight 14 tevinter enemies with literally no weapon so im pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do that (i did that cause i was a dumbass). so what happens is that Micah tried doing that, he ended up fighting a dozen and more soldiers with no weapon or any sort and was quickly subdued. And he was shipped away with the rest of alienage residents before the warden ever got to confront the tevinter slavers unfortunately. he just turned 20. Then after his disappearance, shianni becomes more openly oppose to the tevinters’ presences at the alienage since she’s more convinced that something fishy is going on.   so...a tevinter magister had him....for 10 years. that guy is a blood mage and he’s also like, basically danarius. so like, a demon. Not gonna go into detail about what happened because i dont like to talk too much about actual events that caused the traumas, i just wanna talk about the recovery and dealing with the trauma. but, basically, micah revealed right away that he is a mage, hoping the status of being a mage’d get him released in tevinter but that didn’t happen and the magister kept using his blood to fuel his spells, since his blood is potent with magic. later, the magister also experimented on him with semi-refined lyrium to make his blood even more potent but the experimentation failed and permanently blinded Micah and turned his hair white and he received a long scar from the left eye that goes straight down to his lips and continues down the right half of his torso. Basically, instead of losing a hand like gwindor, Micah lost his sight. And apparently, in canon, king maric got captured by this tevinter blood mage magister dude and alistair had to go and save him or whatever but king maric was hooked to this machine and trapped in this dream-state in the fade so that the blood mage can use his blood and life force to fuel spells. so after Micah is blinded and disfigured and deemed not as “useful” as he is before, what happened to king maric sort of happened to him, but he didn’t spend long enough time hook to the machine so he isn’t gonna die once he’s unhooked from the machine. for a while, Micah doesn’t even know he was trapped in a dream, and when he realizes he’s trapped in the fade, he couldn’t get out and back into his body. Events of inquisition start to happen, this tevinter magister is obviously a venatori, and he went south after the inquisition started to fight the venatori everywhere, probably as reinforcement. he brought Micah with him. And i think my lavellan either confronted this blood mage at hissing wastes (maybe it’s the moutaintop camp? maybe it’s after you cleared out the venatori at hissing waste and he came as reinforcement?). not to digress but i’d love to fight a blood mage in inquisition but that was not meant to be, so it’s happening in this oc fanfic scenario.  Inquisitor finley lavellan had a very hard time trying to get to this guy, and know he’s a quite a powerful mage, and he is forced to retreat with his companions and inquisiton soldiers to the camp. This time lavellan decided to sneak in while his party member created a distraction outside, and once inside the camp, he discovered poor micah hooked to a machine--presumably the source of the magister’s power. pegging the machine as something that traps the elf in the fade, lavellan connects himself to the machine and went to find micah in the fade. With lavellan’s help, micah is able to break away from the eternal dream and wake up. his body is obviously frail from spending a few years immobile, so lavellan tried to sneak out with micah in his arms but they were confronted by the magister who brought numerous archers and ambushed them at the lobby (inside some mountain at hissing waste), lavellan opened one or two rifts to suck in the archers, and petrified the magister with earth magic enhanced by the anchor’s connection to the fade (the magister is immobile and his flesh is slowly hardening from the earth magic but he’s alive and acutely and painfully aware of what’s happening to his body). Micah is the one who got the tear the magister from limb to limb with his own magic and explode him into chunks of meat, avenging the abuse that’s done to him. and finley brought micah with him to skyhold and there he rests and recovers. finley,  inquisition mages (not dorian though, him being tevinter mage and a mediocre healer and all, it’s more like, vivenne and solas actually) all help to nurture him back to health. he become healthy again, even though he is still blind and his hair remains the same grey white colour and the scar that disfigured his face is unremovable. Micah unfortunately becomes afraid of the fade and hates it when he dreams, sometime he’d wake up terrified, not knowing if he wakes up from a dream or if he just drops into one. It was with finley’s help that he become more aware of what’s dream and what’s reality. while Micah’s at skyhold, micah and finley becomes good friends as finley constantly visits him and even brings him a lute after knowing micah loves to play and sings. they become close enough that micah is comfortable singing to finley. micah didn’t get involved with inquisition business while he’s recovering, however, he did discover a way to “see” with the tap of his feet and sounds bouncing off object, kinda like how toph (btw i love toph) “see” with passive earth bending. i like to think micah always favours earth magic and telekinesis and rarely uses other elemental magic. Micah ends up combining his telekinesis skills with a form of weaponizing sounds (it’s sound bending lmao) and develops something very close to the force mage specialization in da 2. aka pushing people off with force of sound, manipulating gravity. And Micah uses sound to “see”, basically. And singing evolves from a hobby to necessity, since humming/singing or playing an instrument allows him to “see”, so that he’s not trapped in an eternal darkness.  with finley’s help, micah finds his way back to his clan still wandering around ferelden and they tearfully welcomed his return after presuming him dead for years. That was like, right after the events of inquisition main game concludes. Then three years later, micah crosses finley again in tevinter out of all places. turns out that micah has seen the dread wolf/solas in the fade and he was offered to join him but micah is loyal to finley and did not answer. More importantly, ever since micah is back, he hate it that everybody pities him. even though his clan loves him still, they treat him like a broken fragile thing who can’t take care of himself. And micah, is able to walk around and goes about his daily business as anybody who has their sights, is sick of people pitying him. The fact that he is no longer the First as he is seen incapable of becoming the keeper angers him (and micah is almost never angry), so he willingly left the clan and started his own journey to find out more about the dread wolf and that journey allows him to cross path with finley again. when micah met finley again, finley has already break up with dorian and now lived in the cottage he built somewhere in the woods at the outskirt of some city. There, they both devised the plan to venture out to ruins of Arlathan as companions to find out the truth about the blight and solas’ plan/stopping solas. 

[impossible-rat-babies]

#30dayDAchallenge

Day 12: Religion

I realize I am a day behind and I’ll hopefully get myself back on track today.

Under the cut bc of length...

Darva Lavellan: 

Darva is faithful to the Dalish patheon. He keeps to the habitual rituals of the gods, particularly The Way of the Three Trees, as he was raised with such principles.

He’s familiar with the vows his mother and father took as craftsman and healer, respectively.

Later on, he adds in the code of the Vir’Banal’ras which goes back to the Dalish assassins. (Fun fact: After he makes a more permanent move to Tevinter, he takes on the more professional aspects of being an assassin for the sake of protecting both Dorian and the members of their growing political faction.)

He hates being made into the symbol of Andraste; he doesn’t necessarily hate her, but he hates being made into this figure of a religion that has caused his people hundreds of years of pain. It feels ironic in the worst way possible.

Thus, he clings more to the Dalish traditions and worship. He doesn’t want to be seen as someone who has lost that and he doesn’t want to wake up to find that in himself.

With the Well of Sorrows, he gets angry at the people around him for what they say. It’s all this history of his people, staring him in the face and Cassandra remarks about how it’s rubbish and Morrigan explains it to someone who already freaking knows.

He knew from the moment that he was going to be the one to partake of the Well, regardless of what Morrigan had to say. Him being the Herald of Andraste is a fucking lie, so that argument is tossed out of the window. Yes, he leads the Inquisition, but if they succeed then it won’t be needed. It’s temporary. He’ll always be an elf, no matter what he does.

He’s upset by what happened to Mythal and how the truth is reinforced by Solas. She was the best of them and she was killed for it. With that, it almost seems justified that he created the veil to lock them away. Almost. (He did destroy what made the elves who they were when he did that and thus they’ll never live up to his standard of the elvish people he knows.)

The whole mess with the Evanuris and Solas puts him in a bad mental space after the conclusion of the Exalted Council. I talked about a lot of it during the Mind Matters on day 4, but his faith is deeply shaken. He doesn’t know what to do with himself; he can’t make sense of it in his head, he feels wrong when he looks at the tattoos on his face… It was all he knew for a majority of his life and it was all destroyed.

Part of him thinks Solas is just lying about it. He can’t think to rationalize it in any other way. Still, something doesn’t sit right and he still loses his faith.

Fen’Harel is getting a fist in the face and killed for wanting to destroy this world. The elves are going to perish with it and he’ll be all alone in his mistake that killed the entire world.

“All of this started with fanatics and arguments about the next world; it’s time we start believing in this one.”

Eth Tabris: 

She’s agnostic and not a particularly pious individual to either the Chantry or the elvhen gods. If she had to be partial to one or the other, it’d be the elvhen gods because of her mother’s faith as a Dalish elf.

She thinks the Chantry could be a force for good as Leliana talks about it in Inquisition. Eth saw the comfort the Maker brought Leliana and the peace she found in the Chantry. Eth would like a Chantry like that. One of support, healing and comfort. Not one filled with politics and corruption.

Neither the Maker nor Andraste have done her any favors and especially the Chantry. She finds her fists more reliable than faith in a god.

With Awakening and subsequently Inquisition, she sees how much being named the Herald bothers Darva. She doesn’t think he’s the big religious figure to start with and after the trip in the Fade, she’s just reassured that she was correct in her thinking.