we're given a specific date (2850 ancient) for when elves first noticed the "quickening" and began to try to avoid humans to prevent it. this is supposedly about 250 years after the first humans settled on mainland thedas, and about 50 years before the old gods began whispering to the "Dreamers" of the neromenian tribes, teaching them magic and making them powerful priest-kings of their people
i already said i'm not going to get into ancient elf lore because this is not my field, so i’m just, sort of, gesturing at the creation of the veil implications so we have a sense of time. that happened around then, theoretically. or a little before and this was when the impact was felt? the dalish seem to believe fen’harel locked away the other gods before humans showed up... ANYWAY i’m not talking about it.
the first of the dreamers is believed to be a specific guy called thalsian, who theoretically encountered the old god dumat in the fade and learned blood magic from him. apparently, the neromenian tribes had already worshipped dragons (they “had worshipped fallen heroes reborn as dragons”, which sounds SO interesting) but as the dreamers came to power—and there’s some accounts that they were the first humans to ever learn magic at all, not just blood magic? i’m not quite clear on that, but if true, you can imagine the kind of power they might have held—the neromenians came around to worshipping their 7 old gods specifically
WAIT. the previous paragraph was all incorrect jsgsjsks. BEAR WITH ME. okay bafflingly, even though thalsian is described as the first dreamer, he’s also supposed to have been around learning blood magic from dumat way, way later, like over a thousand years later from the date we’re now talking about which is described as when the first dreamers, plural, learned magic in general. we should not be talking about him yet at all. Mystifying. Why’d They Call Him That Then.
okay okay so let’s work this one out. thalsian in ~1595 learns blood magic from dumat and converts the neromenians to worshipping the old gods. but we’re also told that way back in ~2800, the old gods taught the neromenian dreamers magic. which is, uh, as far as i can tell before anyone had heard of or was worshipping the old gods. my initial guess for how we’re stapling this together is that this was the retroactive spin on what happened, from thalsian or generally from a post-thalsian, old god worshipping society. more realistically, if the neromenians did learn magic as a whole from anyone it was probably from, like, the elves, right? and then they later Didn’t Want To Talk About That for obvious reasons. so don’t worry it was the old gods guiding us all along 🙏 or maybe it was other spirits instead of elves or whoever but suffice it to say that this is the faith of the old gods snatching the credit later on.
so we’re not worshipping the old gods “yet” at all, thalsian can wait his turn. the neromenians are still for centuries yet going to have this “fallen heroes reborn as dragons” faith. and this is while arlathan still exists next door and more human tribes are moving south. fascinating time period!!
