The Old Gods and the time before the Veil
Let's start with what we already know: in the time before the Veil, there were absurdly powerful magical beings, and humans and similar-scale creatures lived in thrall to them. So far pre-Veil god-like creatures include the titans, the Evanuris, and Yavana's mentions (in the comic, The Silent Grove) of ancient dragons, which certainly sound a lot like Old Gods. However, the construction of the Veil cut those creatures off from their sources of power, and they all seem to have laped into a weaker form. The Old Gods were forced into hibernation deep beneath the earth, only able to whisper to some dreamers on the surface, and most dragons became mere beasts. The Evanuris lost all their power, and became mere spirit-shards, attaching themselves to people like Flemeth, or the reborn Solas. The titans too were forced into sleep, no longer inhabiting a world rich enough in raw magic to sustain their activity.
Fortunately for all of us, the Veil meant that these godlike powers were no longer able to dominate us, so the Veil meant creating room for self-determination, choice, and the eventual rise of civilisation. There were civilisations of a sort before the Veil - Elvhenan, Old God dragon cults, the dwarves as symbiotic servants of the titans - but none of them were truly independent, so to speak. People were enslaved by gods, and danced to their arbitrary whims. The Veil made the gods go away, and so made freedom possible.
It does make me wonder a bit about the creation of the Veil. Clearly the pre-Veil world was much bigger than Elvhenan. The Evanuris were great powers, but not the only powers. I wonder if Solas is overstating it when he takes credit for creating the Veil - his name is Pride, after all, and he does show a habit of overestimating his own power or significance. There was some great calamity to create the Veil, and he may well have had something to do with it, but the comic suggests to me that, whatever it was, it was much bigger than just the elves.
What does it mean when Yavana says "the blood of dragons is the blood of the world"? It's reminiscent of lyrium, the blood of the titans. Both lyrium and dragon blood are very potent substances, charged with some sort of ancient power that predates the Veil. Templars and reavers are not so different.
I note also the recurrent theme of music: lyrium sings, dragon blood sings, the Old Gods sing, the archdemons sing. Then, of course, Andraste sings, the Chant of Light is itself a song, and songs are prominent in DA's stories and marketing. I have no idea what DA is doing with this motif - I'm half-convinced it's just an instinctive imitation of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who both have the world created through music - but it's very noticeable.
Where does the Maker come into this, if anywhere? I can find no reference to humans existing before the Veil: there were clearly none in Elvhenan, and Yavana's description of the time before the Veil ("It [dragon blood] sings of a time when dragons ruled the skies. A time before the Veil, before the mysteries were forgotten.") and accompanying art has no illustration of humans either. The Chant's narrative of the creation of the Veil is roughly: 1) the Maker creates the Golden City and spirits, 2) the spirits are garbage and don't do anything, 3) the Maker takes some of the substance of the Fade and from it creates the material world, which contains change, potential, freedom, and an interplay of opposites, and puts the Veil in between to keep the worlds separate 4) the Maker creates humans to live in the material world, but they will remember the Fade in dreams, 5) the spirits are envious of humans and try to take over the world, they call themselves gods and demand worship, 6) the Maker casts out those spirits for their crimes and turns them into the Old Gods deep within the earth.
The thing is, then, before the Veil everything was in a sense a spirit. I recall once reading someone here suggesting that elves are literally spirits made flesh or descended from spirits. The Evanuris themselves are big spirits. Look at their names and the names of ancient elves: Solas is Pride, Elgar'nan is Spirit of Vengeance, Abelas is Sorrow. Apparently a section of the Fade in Trespasser looks noticeably brighter to elven PCs, which seems suggestive.
So it seems like it would be reasonable to speculate that certain beings, most notably elves and dragons, and possibly titans, were themselves spirits in the time before the Veil. Elvhenan was in a sense a kingdom in the Fade: spirit-gods ruling lesser spirits. This would also track very well with elves being immortal, since as far as I know all spirits are immortal. Mortality is a property of the material world. When the Veil was created, many spirits were trapped on the material side, or perhaps expelled to the material side somehow, and became spirits-made-flesh. If so, then it's not surprising that these creatures and their descendants retain a far greater affinity for the Fade than material natives, so to speak, like humans.
That is interesting, surely? It seems like the Veil and the creation of the material world were deeply traumatic for most of these creatures, so, naturally, they want to get back to the other side. That would explain why the Old Gods wanted the magisters of Tevinter to create a bridge to the Fade; and, of course, it's Solas' goal. I would speculate, then, that perhaps the song of the Old Gods is a song of sorrow and loss, of exile and the quest to return home. In that light look at the way the Architect describes the song in Awakening. The Architect describes the call of the Old Gods as something ineffably or impossibly beautiful, something the darkspawn are always driven by and seeking to lay their hands on, but they always lose it - it is corrupted the moment they touch it, and ever retreats from them. Look at the way the Grey Wardens describe the call (Dragon Age: Last Flight, chapter 3):
As the griffon began to climb through the clouds that followed the Blight, Isseya heard a faint, strange melody seep into her mind. She had no sense of it as actual sound; rather, it seemed to come from within, almost as if she were humming the tune to herself.
She could never have imagined such a song, though. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard. Aching and ethereal, it seemed to pull her toward a memory of nostalgic bliss that she had somehow lost—but that she would do anything to recover. Anything at all.
That does indeed sound like a song of lament, of loss and a desire to return home, no matter the cost.
So here's my theory, and you can read into this anything about the Maker you wish:
In the beginning, there was only the Fade. Reality was a sea of potential, of unbounded existence and power. Spirits came into being. Naturally immortal and magical, they sought each other out, and set about creating reality. These spirits included not only spirits as we know them today, but the ancient precursors of the elves. Great spirits took on different forms, but these were frequently mutable, reality being a matter of the imagination. The greatest spirits were the Evanuris, the titans, the dragons, and more.
But little came of this world. Without the stability of fixed laws of nature, there could be little change or growth. Everything was immortal, but everything was also mutable. Real change required more than that. The elven spirits built a great civilisation by some measures, but it was essentially just hierarchies of spirits playing games, feuding with each other, seeking happiness with little rhyme or rhythm. The dragons were the greatest predators of the Fade, and lorded over this world of primal emotion. The titans strode across the landscape, building what they would, destroying that they would, seeking something permanent: accompanied by clans of lesser spirits in their own image.
Then something happened, shattering this world. One of the greatest pride spirits of the Evanuris believed he did it - but as memory and reality were mutable, who can say? The Fade was broken. Much of it was separated and remade into a new world, a material world of stable physical laws, where thought and imagination would no longer shape reality. The titans were made into the bones of this new world. They had originally been the most permanent spirits in the world, the spirits who most incarnated the idea of a fixed reality, and so they became the earthbones. The titans, cut off from the raw power of the Fade, slept, but they and their children kept on shaping and structuring the depths of the world. The elven spirits were trapped in the material world, and became flesh. They became mortal, and gradually forgot their origins as spirits. Some of the Evanuris retained a measure of power, but this was strewn across the world wildly. (One might add here something about the Forgotten Ones, if so inclined.) Finally, many dragons were left in the material world, and while most were just mindless predators, several of the greatest of them were intelligent. Like the titans, they were forced into hibernation, but they dreamed of home and sought to return.
So this is the origin of elves and dwarves: the former literally immortal spirits compelled to take on mortal flesh, and the latter literally the fundaments of the earth, the children of the stone. In addition to them, many new forms of life arose native to the material world. All the beasts of the earth, birds of the air, and fish of the sea came about this way; and perhaps so did humans, though humans admittedly remain highly mysterious. The elves tried to build an echo of their home before the Veil, but ultimately could not, and the humans came into the space left behind.
However, while material beings, humans had something like spirits, which returned to the Fade or was able to manipulate its energies. The humans experimented: while some other beings wanted to return home to the Fade, to humans it was more like a new land to conquer. The dreaming Old Gods whispered of the quest to return to the Fade, speaking to rare human dreamers. Humans quickly discovered that the blood of the great spirits-made-flesh - titan blood, and dragon blood - held great power, and had some resonance with the fade. Human experimentation with the raw power of dragon blood led to the birth of the kossith; or perhaps the mutation of the kossith, who may originally have been a human or humanoid tribe who deliberately drank or infused themselves with dragon's blood over generations, and so became a taller, horned race. But the most potential seemed to lie in lyrium, and eventually the humans sought to enter the Fade, and perhaps smash the Fade back into the material world and accomplish what the exiled gods always wanted. But humans were never meant to be there, and it was a disaster.
And, alas, it is a disaster that all the races of the world are still paying for a thousand years later.
