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@hiraecies
headcanon that after a warden has been tainted long enough, there is enough solid blight within their blood that when they bleed the blackness, almost ink - like, is visible amongst the red. eventually, there is more black than crimson. if they are close to their true calling, there’s nary any natural blood to be found.
Nidhi Sunil — born in 1993 — India
prior to being effectively exiled from the trevelyan family for attempting to smuggle his mage sister out of the free marches before she could be forced into a circle, alexei was known for being both charming and incorrigible — and a terrible flirt.
spring in val royeaux
The world has no right to my heart The world has no place in our bed They don’t get to know what I said I’m burning the memories Burning the letters that might have redeemed you
Congratulations on the quote of the year, Madej.
sybil experiences prophetic dreams — they’re often prophetic in general theme more than in exact events, but that happens, rarely, too. she’s aware of and trusts these visions, though she rarely tells others about them. her father’s the only one who really knows, though — she’s alluded to it with bethany several times, so she had some idea, though much more rarely with carver.
an example: as a child she once dreamed that she was to be caught by templars and the family would be forced to run; she spent the month being incredibly careful with and avoiding the use of her magic. it turned out to be bethany who would be caught, actually, though the family running remained the same.
in verses where she brings carver to the deep roads, she has a dream before the trip that he’s to be poisoned by the coterie ( not entirely unheard of, given that he and sybil were the reason that athenril’s operation survived when the coterie tries to take it out ) — she brought him to avoid leaving him alone. it turned out, of course, that he was poisoned in a very different way. if she left him when she went to the deep roads, she instead dreamed of him becoming a darkspawn and attacking them — she left him behind to spare him that, though the prophecy that he would become her enemy spoke true.
shortly before here lies the abyss, she has dreams of being trapped in a very small cage she cannot escape from.
there are exactly two points in the game where isala refers to the elves as ‘my people.’ those are — after helping briala take control of court, she tells solas that ‘our people will be better off.’ solas responds with confusion and admits that he doesn’t consider the elves his people, though is happy that they’ve got an advocate now. the second time is with abelas, where she gasps that he could help ‘our people’ and he sneers at her that she and the elves are not his people.
isala feels — hugely disconnected from the elves. she has the vallaslin and wears ( heavily altered ) elvhen armor but she was run from her clan and has spent much of the rest of her life with humans. she doesn’t feel like she has a right to claim elfiness. about the only times she ever does feel like maybe, just maybe, she can claim that is when helping briala or speaking to abelas, and both of those suggestions get shot down pretty hard.
this desire to Be Elfy is also what drives her to take part in the elvhen rituals rather than skip them, and to a lesser extent what inspires her to drink from the well. she’s trying.
( her response after trespasser is…predictable. )
isala is extremely disquieted by the events at therinfal, and they follow her for a long time. she’s terrified of being the kind of leader that envy intended to make her into, and she’s even more terrified that she allowed envy to see as much of her as it did. no one knows her story, who she is or what she is. that a demon does, and got that through violating her, is horrifying. ‘you are under the mistaken assumption that i require consent.’ isala’s greatest fear is the loss of control of herself —— and both having something in her head, rooting around, and physically seeing her body do things that she would never do make that fear very, very loud. in the fade, she sees envy demons, not spiders.
a minor addendum: she’s very put off and uncomfortable when solas tells her that spirits can return to life and may retain their memories, because that means there is a chance that envy will return, and that it will remember her.
dorian: are you alright, saares? saares: — huh? dorian: i can’t help but notice that you seem…tired. saares: sleeping badly. nightmares. i’m okay. dorian: ah. may i inquire as to the nature of your nightmares? you don’t have tell me if you don’t want to. saares: the qunari. rebinding me. cutting out my — tongue and restitching my mouth. dorian: i suspected as much. saares: i don’t like it. dorian: i know you don’t. we’ll focus our next lesson on the controlling of one’s dreams within the fade; that should help. saares: okay. dorian: and if it’s any consolation, i’ve no intention of letting anyone bind you again. saares: ——- thank you.
//
cole: you’re safe here. saares: too tired, cole. cole: you’re far from the ones that hurt you. saares: not from all of them. cole: the dreams are bad. binds so tight around the arms, yanking back and together and it makes your shoulders ache. rethreading the needle through the old holes around your mouth. i won’t go back in that cage. i will die before i go back in that cage. saares: — yes. cole: i’m sorry. i won’t let anyone touch you. if anyone even thinks of it i’ll stop them. saares: even…? cole: especially him.
prior to being effectively exiled from the trevelyan family for attempting to smuggle his mage sister out of the free marches before she could be forced into a circle, alexei was known for being both charming and incorrigible — and a terrible flirt.
oftentimes in inquisition, marigold’s actions can be traced not to logic or thought, but to FEAR. she is so determined to be a coward no longer, not to allow her fear to rule her, that when something does frighten her she forces herself to do that thing even if it would be more logical not to. drinking from the well is an example — she was terrified to do it, so she did. she almost regrets it; morrigan would make better use of what fills her skull and drowns her thoughts in quiet moments ( and the agony, for her, might not be so great ). but she could not allow her fear to rule her.
okay, so — outside of other verses and aus and etc., this is sort of the way my Canon Timeline works with regards to lena and alistair and their romance collapsing and then getting fixed and. all that. obviously this is all on my end, no force - shipping, et cetera et cetera, alistairs feel free to ignore this. but under the cut we go!
helena, throughout origins, is a very…static character. like, her opinions change — switches from lawful good to chaotic good, gets better about elves and circles and Human Rights as she’s exposed to atrocities — but it’s because at her base she’s empathetic and kind. those things don’t change, and her character doesn’t change. and her not changing is intentional on her part, i need to emphasize. she’s not changing because she’s not really being herself, in that she’s upholding herself to be this heroic knight errant archetype, and archetypes don’t change. they just do the Right Thing and carry on. when she fails to do the right thing — killing amalia comes to mind — then she’s broken and devastated because she failed to live up to that, but by and large nothing really changes.
and this creates problems Across The Board with her companions, primarily in that none of them know much or at all about the full extent of how much she’s hurting. and in relation to her romances, know much about who she is just as a person. it’s more pronounced with alistair, because honestly zevran Drags It Out Of Her because he’s perceptive in a way alistair isn’t. so she and alistair fall in love with each other, but because she’s not allowing herself to fully be a person she doesn’t upon up and shit with him, and end result she loves the idea of him more than she loves him ( she does love him, just not…in love with him as she thinks ) and he loves the archetype more than the person. they are both in love with each other, as they are, but it’s shaky. and they don’t really realize it til end game.
speaking of. end game. alistair is crowned, everyone is like wooo future queen and current king, it’s great. it’s Swell. the problem is that in the weeks and months following the end of the blight, lena sort of starts to fall apart. without the immediate danger and everything involved therein, she…begins to collapse. it’s harder to not allow herself the emotions and the breaking she’s been pushing back. and so she isolates a bit, and pulls back, and alistair doesn’t know what to do, and she realizes that oh, wait. she’s actually not in love with alistiar as she thought. because how could she be, if she was never wholly real and honest with him?
they stop sleeping together. things get awkward. they never outright talk about it, but he puts the pieces together and resents her a bit. she feels guilty about it and doesn’t know what to do, because she doesn’t know how to be honest with him any longer. she never knew how to be honest with him. it’s tense.
they…start talking again shortly before their wedding, because he puts his fucking foot down. because he’s finally like Okay Fuck This and sorta gently but firmly makes her talk about her fucking emotions and be a fucking person. and she sucks it up and does it, because she cares about him, and he deserves that.
they’re still on rocky ground by the time the wedding rolls around six months after the blight ends, but it’s a start. they start teasing again, not as lovers but as friends. they talk honestly about shit. it’s still tense and weird, but it’s better. she’s better. they start to feel more comfortable around one another, and they sleep together a few times, and she starts to think that lena as herself, not just lena as the archetype, might love him, too. and it helps alistair, too, because he gets to know his wife. his real wife, who’s good and kind and loving but also capable of being selfish and sometimes arrogant and foolish and idealistic.
then she has to go to vigil’s keep. they tease each other. “will you be staying, dear husband?” “oh, don’t tempt me, you minx.” he kisses her goodbye on the cheek, not the mouth, and that hurts a little but it’s for the best.
and in a very real way awakenings is helena’s ‘hardening’ scenario, and i don’t mean that in a bad way. awakenings is when she gets better at lying, better at being honest, too, better at learning that you have to be a person and that sometimes the story books aren’t perfect guides. the same way alistair stays himself if he’s hardened, just more confident and willing to assert himself and in some ways more selfless because he’s willing to do what has to be done, she stays kind and good and righteous, but more willing to allow herself to figure into the situation, not just the archetype. more willing to do what has to be done. more willing to be privately selfish. it makes her a better queen, and a more compassionate one, and when she returns to alistair’s side they’re both better.
the end is a happy one because i’m a sucker. it probably takes close to a year, but they do fall in love with each other again, and this time it’s not as ideals they’re projecting on each other. then they’re very, very happy.
in game marigold is almost exclusively blue / diplomatic, though in canon towards the beginning its a much more frightened / stuttery / meek version of what we’re usually presented with; she doesn’t get confident enough for the kind of speech patterns that you hear in blue until very near the end of the game. by trespasser, she’s even swearing!
the exception to the generally blue rule is that she indulges in purple with varric about 40% of the time and with blackwall about 30% — until she specializes in necromancy and he gets shitty, in which case she goes down to exclusively blue with him for a while. but she’s constantly purple with sera after they’ve been together for a while, and it makes me feel so warm because marigold spent her whole life constructing this very careful meek quiet polite personality because that was just safest in the circles —— but with sera she feels like she can mock and joke and prod and tease, and knows she won’t be punished for it.
sybil cuts her hair after the deep roads because it’s length got in the way several times within, and also because she badly needs to change something or else the carver thing would have made her explode. she cuts it again after leandra dies because she goes so long without leaving the house or brushing it that by the time she comes out it’s essentially impossible to salvage.
hiraecies-a:
like…no one knows anything about isala. even leliana can’t figure out where she actually comes from; she can trace the name isala back to mercenary groups, avvar tribes, et cetera, but she can’t find her clan because there was no isala in the clan. no one even knows she’s possessed until she shows up at camp post - haven glowing. she doesn’t tell anyone anything. no one even knows her actual name!! they just know she’s irreverent and does dumb shit constantly, that she makes solas miserable, that she gets on better with cole than she ought to. in a verse where she hasn’t romanced anyone, she isn’t actually close to anyone. cole knows, but she doesn’t tell him anything. varric is closest, and if she’d spill to anyone it would be him, but he puts up walls and so does she, and even he doesn’t actually know anything. he goes to write about her in his story and realized that he can’t. even in verses where she does romance blackwall, she doesn’t even tell him her name until weeks after she spares him and it’s extraordinarily difficult for her ( she literally hasn’t told anyone her name since she was seventeen ), and he doesn’t learn about her Backstory until trespasser. it takes her fucking boyfriend like 3 and a half years to learn her backstory!!
she doesn’t feel safe or good enough; she always assumes that she’s going to be cast out. like her clan did, like every mercenary group she’s ever been part of did, like the avvar did. everything. she’s scared and furious with herself for being like this, and hates never belonging anywhere, but is so used to it. used to it enough that it’s almost a kind of comfort; never being permanent, never having bonds. no one knowing anything about her. less hurt that way. it doesn’t hurt as much for them to exile you if you never have a chance to get close, after all.
besides. the people in the inquisition? most of them are good. and good people don’t deserve her bullshit.
