Lore and Theories: the Fade and the Void
Ferreting out the truth behind the teachings of the Chantry, the dwarves, the elves, Tevinter, or even the Grey Wardens regarding the nature of the Fade, the Void, the taint (the driving force of the Blight), magic, Titans, and many other aspects that underlie Thedas is a tricky prospect. No one group has the full truth – some is deliberately distorted, some falsehoods come from ignorance, and other aspects are simply forgotten and buried as consequences of time and calamity. And yet there are nuggets of truth to be found in the commonalities they share, and in the ways some pieces of knowledge fit together like a puzzle.
However, some has to be arrived at through analysis and conjecture, so what follows is basically a combination of all of the above. Consider this to be an elaborate headcanon of mine, then, and accept or reject as you will. Supportive links will be provided throughout.
THE FADE AND THE VOID
In this one case, I believe the Chantry is 100% correct when it is asserted that “the Fade is a realm of primeval matter from which the Maker formed the physical world and all living beings.” …minus the part regarding “the Maker.” While it is entirely possible that there is a sentient progenitor force controlling the shaping and destiny of Thedas, I rather view it with a more scientific eye: the Fade is a kind of spiritual/magical “primordial soup,” a vast and limitless pool of creative possibility. It is a point of origin for all things, a Big Bang, if you will.
In essence, the Fade is the Maker. (Geldauran’s Claim potentially agrees with me.)
There is still room for God in the above assertion, though not as the Chantry would conceive it. Looked at from a more spiritual or religious standpoint, consider also the concept of Ain Soph, or Ain Soph Aur, from the Kabbalah (original Jewish tradition) or Qabala (a more secular hermetic magic tradition that “borrowed” many of the same concepts). The Kabbalah’s “Tree of Life” with its attendant Spheres or Sephiroth are all emanations from Ein Soph, the “limitless light” representative of God; as one travels through and down the pathways between them, they reflect less of the “light” and more of thoughts, emotions, and physical matter (though there is always a spark to tie them together). If one sees the Fade as a crude Thedosian equivalent of Ain Soph, then other concepts begin to make more sense as “emanations” from the Fade.
This would include the Void, which is a negation or absence of all creative force.
“However, according to the Canticle of Threnodies the Void is not equal to the Fade but rather is in it, as well as in other things.”
“In Dragon Age: Until We Sleep, chapter 3 Aurelian Titus says that “there are void places, gaps between dreams” referring to the raw Fade.”
“Staff of the Void dating back to the old Tevinter Imperium bears the following inscription: “There is strength in absence. Absence of weakness, and of limitation. Absence of caution, and of mercy. The Void has always been within."”
Where things get dicey is when we come to the idea of a “sundered song,” as Cole puts it. (In banter with Varric, he says: “Do you write to reach across? To hear the song that was sundered?”) If Solas is romanced, Cole tries to tell an upset Lavellan why Solas broke up with her, speaking of “an old pain from before, when everything sang the same.” Why this is relevant to the Void and the Fade is the possibility that both had been a little more integrated, once. Time and again, the Void is referred to as a separate place – a place where the Evanura (or elven goddess) Andruil once visited to hunt the Forgotten Ones, for example.
You see, both the Fade and the Void have their own “songs” that can be heard. With the Fade, it’s more easily ascribed to lyrium, which “exists both in the waking world and in the Fade and somehow bridges the gap between them,” and which has also been discovered to the blood of Titans. “Raw lyrium emits a strangely soothing sound that some call the voice of the Maker.” “Dwarven miners […] claim that they hear the Stone sing.” According to Justice, spirits cannot hear lyrium “singing” in the Fade. Mages can hear it, and have a particular sensitivity to raw lyrium such that it’s possible for them to go mad from enough exposure.
Magic itself, which mages draw from the substance of the Fade, has music as well:
Dorian: Cole, do you hear magic?
Cole: Yes. I do. Don’t you?
Dorian: Spells sometimes makes a sound but… I don’t think we hear the same thing.
Cole: Don’t your spells whisper things to you? What is and could be, music in the mind of strange, far away places?
Dorian: Not lately.
Cole: Then we don’t hear the same thing.
Cole may only be “hearing” magic because he’s no longer in the Fade, having taken on a physical form on the other side of the Veil. Ditto with lyrium, red lyrium, and the call of the Old Gods. The Void’s song is a kind of distorted version of the Fade’s, as expressed through the taint that becomes a Blight. Tainted creatures are corrupted in their very souls; the taint is a spiritual cancer that eats away at sentience, memory, and most emotions, turning people into ghouls, the Magisters Sidereal into “the first darkspawn,” Old Gods becoming Archdemons, and so forth. “Ordinary darkspawn are believed to be soulless.”
Lyrium – those waters of the Fade and the blood of Titans – corrupted with Blight becomes red lyrium, which Cole tells us has a different song. Red lyrium tends to induce madness, paranoia, fantastic strength, and more from the mildest exposures all the way to ingestion. Much of the strengths the ingesters exhibit remind us of the abilities of darkspawn. Additionally, those who exposed to it for prolonged periods or ingest it begin hearing its song, much like darkspawn and Grey Wardens hear the call of the Old Gods. Cole says those taking red lyrium hear "the song behind the door old whispers want opened.”
So it’s unclear if the Fade and the Void are entirely separate, or if the latter is a distortion that exists in the gaps of all things. The only thing that seems certain is that they are very definitely tied to each other in some fashion.
In addition there is another kind of “sundered song” that Cole could be referring to, and that is the song of the Titans to their children, versus the song the Old Gods sing that draws the darkspawn. (Which Cole again makes clear are different things in Chapter 11 of the novel “Asunder” when he’s pulled through into the Fade along with the others during Wynne’s ritual to reach and rescue Pharamond. He saw and heard darkspawn near the Abyssal Rift in the Western Approach prior to it and noted the difference.) Remember that once “everything sang the same,” so these two songs apparently used to be part of one song but were pulled apart and made different somehow. Was it when a physical world was formed from the Fade? Or perhaps was it after that, after Solas created the Veil? Or between both, when the Evanuris “struck down the pillars of the Earth”?
There are pieces of all of these possibilities in the Chantry’s story of the Maker and his First children, the Second children, the Original sin, the Second sin, and so forth. But most importantly and curiously is this stanza from the Chant of Light:
And He knew he had wrought amiss.
So the Maker turned from his firstborn
And took from the Fade
A measure of its living flesh
And placed it apart from the Spirits, and spoke to it, saying:
Here, I decree
Opposition in all things:
For earth, sky
For winter, summer
For darkness, Light.
By My Will alone is Balance sundered
And the world given new life.
It’s also worth noting that the part “opposition in all things” is also echoed in the Schools of Magic.
“The first of the two Schools of Energy, Spirit is opposed by the Primal School.”
“Sometimes called the School of Power, the Primal School is the second of the Schools of Energy, balanced by Spirit, and concerns the most visible and tangible forces of nature itself.”
“The School of Creation, sometimes called the School of Nature, is the second of the Schools of Matter, the balancing force and complement of Entropy.”
“The first of the two Schools of Matter, Entropy is the opposing force of Creation; for this reason it is often called the School of Negation. Nothing lives without death.”
In this I see “emanations” of the Fade (like the Kabbalah) once again: magic is magic, as Solas says, but the uses to which it is put can be different as the philosophies and modes of thought required to manipulate energies to bring about the desired results. The possible exception is Blight magic, which allows one to manipulate not just the taint, but the forces the taint comes from, which come from the Void (as detailed earlier). (This can be seen in the book “The Calling,” where in the final fight with Enchanter Remille he uses the Blight magic learned from the Architect on Duncan, who counteracts it with the blade he stole from the Enchanter. This is also further underscored in DA:I dialogue between Vivienne and Solas after “Here Lies the Abyss,” where she differentiates Blight magic from “ordinary” magic and elven magic.)
Other things both affirm and throw confusion regarding the nature of the Fade and the Void. Most things agree that the Fade is a wellspring of magic. The existence of the Black City and its description in the Fade, however, throws potential further confusion regarding the Void. Here are several quotes from The World of Thedas, Volume I, that talk about both:
p. 90: “Magic courses through all living beings in Thedas. Some even believe it is the power that gives all beings life. Yet despite magic’s ubiquity, only a rare few possess the ability to manipulate it.”
p. 92: "It is potential that dwells within a person but does not always manifest itself,“ influential Circle enchanter Wenselus once said of mana. "All men are connected to the Fade; we go there to dream. But only those with this potential may draw upon its power. Mana is, then, a measurement of one’s ability to draw power from the Fade, and it is this power that is expended in magic.”
p. 131: “The Fade is an otherworldly realm of great power and mystery, a wellspring of magic, and, to some, the source of creation. They say you enter this kingdom of spirits when you sleep, as well as when you die, and that a corruption at its heart set in motion the Blight.”
The Chantry also lends some of their own confusion, whether deliberately or ignorantly: “Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls.” (The abyss usually referring to the Void, not the Fade, and the Chantry usually calls the Maker ‘the well of all souls’ and yet this stanza further says, “From these emerald waters doth life begin anew.”)
Note that the Black City is at the heart of the Fade, no matter where one turns and looks. But note also that “a corruption at its heart set in motion the Blight.” Whether this means that a crack in the Fade leading to the Void lives at the heart of the Black City, or whether this obliquely refers to Andruil’s hunts in the Void and Arlathan, is uncertain. The Black City having once been Arlathan before Solas created the Veil has been theorized and is supported by one line that Cole says while in the Fade: “They still remember when they were higher, before it woke up and everything fell.“ Additionally, “[e]lves believe that their gods have been trapped in the Eternal City at the heart of the Beyond.” Further, Cole implies in dialogue with Solas and Lavellan that Solas trapped the Evanuris behind an eluvian: “They sleep, masked in a mirror, hiding, hurting, and to wake them…” Lastly, Avernus says in his notes about manipulating tainted blood: “In my dreams, I see the Black City, and I am drawn towards it. There is something there, an answer to what this taint is, this taint that we share with the darkspawn…”
In the end, for some people it may be most convenient to consider the Fade and the Void to be two sides of the same coin. It’s this interpretation, after all, that carries the most hope for an eventual cure for the taint and ending the Blights.
Just replaying DA:tV today and bringing up another of Solas's regret murals, the one about his dagger and severing the Titans' dreams.
The part about the Blight and the Titans' song reminded me of this ginormous theory post I'd made, and it was nice to know at least some of it was right.
Helps to kind of figure out how the cosmology *works* as you piece together lore when you're not a developer or loremaster.
