ok alright. i am finally posting ✨where there's smoke✨ my inquisition au fic! newest chapter is here!
the premise, in short:
what if, after anders was notably an apostate who blew up a chantry building and killed a chantry leader... people are not particularly stoked when this happens again. except even more destructively. and this time with a Heathen Elf™️ found at the scene.
so, instead of seeing the prisoner as any sort of positive religious omen, (most of) the people in haven instead see her as a dangerous criminal, and react accordingly. and this starts to cause further problems. solavellan is also there eventually.
the premise, in long:
what if the tranquil didn't just all get turned into oculara offscreen, and actually were part of the plot.
what if anders and kirkwall haunted the narrative a bit more.
what if, a dalish elf who suddenly wakes up in chantry custody for a mass murder... assumes any personal information shared will lead to providing a target for an exalted march. and therefore doesn't share any. which only looks more suspicious lmao.
what if the dalish/city elf stuff was not written in a way that i personally found very stupid (it will at least, be stupid in a new, different way! diversity win <3)
[holds up incredibly minor npcs] "i just think they're neat"
what if leliana's rose vision and general heretical tendencies went somewhere. i think she can have a little a chantry schism, as a treat.
what kind of weird person would be like "hm yes. i love to wander around. as a visibly dalish apostate. all by myself :^)" and, what reasons might they have for going to the conclave directly, when it's literally Templar Central. here's her character tag uwu.
also i retconned some aspects of vg lore when i felt like it. didn't make sense and doesn't compel me! the elves don't need white guilt! solas cannot be arlathan's most special, invaluable, genius military mastermind, who singlehandedly won the titan war, and invented tranquility, the blight, eluvians, and sliced bread - then was still mythal's yappy lapdog who got laughed at in meetings afterwards. that is just contradictory fhdghfkdh.
i feel like you could make a Truly Harrowing Grimdark fic out of veilguard if you actually just. take the offscreen events seriously, and retain the previous stuff like "blight is incurable" and "elves are oppressed" and "evanuris are unkillable through any means found in millennia, even when they kill each other" and "the black city is already 2 steps away from breaking open, and it's inherently tied to the veil"
so then it's really like:
rook interferes with the ritual, releases 2 evanuris and the blight into thedas. multiple countries begin collapsing under darkspawn and famine. i think even orzammar goes quiet? i don't agree with the "oh ferelden got blighted and it was fine!" argument, bc this is now like 3 countries over a huge geographical area, and it's said that famine is looming and the survivors are few enough to fit into individual cities. that's REALLY bad.
everyone is now aware that the cause of this is the Evil Elven Gods, from their religion already banned by the chantry, but that elves were known to practice in secret. retaliation begins. all the elves in thedas are now seen as suspect at best, and responsible for this at worst.
rook's team is busy having coffee, organizing a book club, and cooking for each other cutely. occasionally bickering with solas, but not asking him any useful questions about this whole trainwreck, or about what his plan actually was, before.
tevinter and the antivan crows remain powerful through everything - tevinter is now completely unchecked, bc no other part of southern thedas would be able to repel their influence. tevinter practices mass slavery of elves, and the antivan crows do as well, in a slightly different way, in that they bank on elves being considered attractive and good honeypots for assassinations. and that's not good, because...
it's revealed that not only did the Evil Elven Gods cause all this recent carnage, they also invented the blight! this is a huge W for tevinter. their greatest national embarrassment can now be pinned on their ancient enemy. they immediately argue that the original magisters were actually just being brainwashed by the Evil Gods, and actually, thedas is SO lucky that tevinter destroyed arlathan. it was an evil place worshipping evil gods!
elves across thedas are, presumably, facing violently forced conversion to andrastianism at best, or massascres, exile, and enslavement at worst. in this trying time, at least they have. uhhh. bellara's white guilt to help advocate for them, as she said maybe they shouldn't be trusted after all? oh ok. well if the elves themselves say they can't be trusted...
in most people's eyes, this immediately reframes the entire chant of light. if shartan was an elf, and he wanted to give his people a nation where they could worship Evil Elven Gods... how could he have been truly allied with andraste? did HE betray her, actually? is this why the dales never helped with the blight and deserved to be destroyed?
harding discovers and reconnects to the titans - concludes that, despite being alive and sapient and having their literal blood being mined out of their bodies by their estranged children, their time is over. presumably, they stay comatose and in eternal suffering until uhhh. idk. either the dwarves run out of lyrium or the titans lash out into mass earthquakes when they reach their limit(?). who knows!
you can prop up a regime of... immortal mages in nevarra. having mages with immortality went super well for the elves, no problems. imagine if, say, the chantry was destabilized and these immortal mages no longer have anything to fear from anybody else? surely they wouldn't take power forever. haha. don't worry, these ones are really nice, they're just into uhhh. summoning spirits into corpses to create huge labour forces. and they're goth.
meanwhile, the Evil Elven Gods have been killed! yay! but actually, are they going to stay dead...? all the evanuris ganged up together to kill mythal, and she survived for millennia. they would've certainly known about her dragon and tried to kill it, too - if they failed after that, that means they're truly unkillable in some way. solas was trying to kill these guys for however many centuries - if it was as simple as "boss fight the dragon and then the evanuris" he would've done that instead of some galaxy brain reality-altering stuff that knocked him into a coma?
so, they're gone for now. luckily the blight and the veil can be held up! by one guy who's uhhh. in eternal solitary confinement, watching the last of his people get hunted down by the chantry. and he's not really immortal. and tevinter may be gunning for him anyway, and they now have enough slaves to access huge amounts of blood to reach the black city again. and the veil thins by itself whenever there's anything like "war" or "suffering" so... it's about to turn into swiss cheese.
anyway, what if dragon age was about a young witch in a fully post apocalyptic setting, looking for unblighted food and water while dodging rival warlords and tevinter slavers, and elves have become reclusive and nearly extinct, and the veil is so thin, and the black city is so close, that it can actually be seen in the sky like a portent of doom. also there are book clubs still.
actually this could be so wild if it's alongside a really low-approval, brutal, chantry stooge type of inquisitor worldstate, haha. like fully "ally with templars, kill the sentinel elves, kill the wisdom spirit, screw over the dalish whenever possible, gaspard on the throne, embrace the herald of andraste concept" type of situation.
like yeah. no WONDER the inquisition found nothing of use in the 10 years they were hunting for solas. they were busy becoming a new branch of the chantry. they're not going to find any useful info on the heretical elven gods or the blight or the ancient magisters - that's not maker-honouring! they end up descending rapidly into corruption within years, and had zero possible leads except for "send varric and his single random protege to intercept solas, i guess?" which doesn't work.
and then it turns out the protege is both really incompetent, and not taking the issue very seriously, while the inquisition itself struggles and fails to protect southern thedas from the enormous amounts of blight and chaos being loosed on it.
anyway smash cut to like 200 years later, when some poor dumbass in this severely post-apocalyptic, earthquake/blight/war/demons/undead ravaged landscape of thedas, is once again trying to access the black city. to see if they can dredge out the rumoured last remaining person with the required magical knowledge to fix things. third time's the charm(?)
so, you know how rook can inexplicably encourage lavellan to reunite with solas, and THEN stab him? and lavellan does nothing? well. let's say they do actually interfere, try to stop rook, and then rook has to kill them before stabbing solas and sticking him in the omelas containment prison.
yay! thedas has been saved from being drowned in demons, by drowning half of it in blight. high fives all around.
200 years pass. reva, loyally, is spending all this time trying to figure out a way to free her boss. the world, as established, starts fucking collapsing about 2 minutes after the ending of veilguard.
reva, alongside a ragged, pathetic group of postapocalypse thedas residents (your pc included!) finally manages to get a way to crack open solas' jail and pull him out, in order to get his help as the one magical expert who might be able to fix things. this jailbreak is partially possible purely bc uhh. the veil is so nearly Gone that the black city is basically just visible in the sky now. lmao.
solas, world's unhappiest pride demon, is at like 2 hp after the stab wound, and also completely grief-stricken and embittered by watching his lover get killed trying to protect him, and the solitary confinement. he is SO unlikeable at this point. his ass is not doing stuff like "helping random refugees" or "approving of asking questions" or "playing mind chess to cheer up his friend". he's only in it out of a vague shred of sunk cost "i guess i put in enough effort into trying to fix the world already, may as well keep going" and pride demonesque "hm i see i'm Once Again the only one who can solve this". there's a 90% chance he betrays the whole party, minus reva, just for enrichment.
however, reva has now spent a long time living on thedas and trying to work with the pathetic cringe fail mortals she once despised. and she's romanceable/befriendable.
so reva is now in the position of starting to have her allegiances shifting bc she's getting attached. and solas would disagree both out of pride demon principles, and the very apt point of "don't care for a mortal, bc they'll die in front of you, and perhaps even because of you, and it'll be the most miserable thing you can ever experience". unfortunately, the one weakness of ancient elves seems to be: random earnest mortals who look at them like this 🥺 one time.
and then... idk. reva's in a strange combo of going through solas' Inquisition Crisis, while also being in a felassan 2.0 situation with an even MORE embittered and murder-happy boss - but he does owe her one for the prison break. but also, how would she react to his inevitable betrayal of the party? who would she side with? is it actually possible to make solas be less than 90% pride demon by volume, or is it too late for his better nature to win out?
anyway that's the optimistic sequel to veilguard! they do still have book clubs in this game btw :)
ok, i had to add another point to this, bc of @crimsonphantasmagoria's very good post about The Fucking Moon's Orbit:
so let's say that... after being stabbed by rook, elgar'nan is either dead, or dead-ish. so at best, he'll probably pop back up in a host mythal-style, but he's probably not powerful enough to put the moon back in orbit?
this causes widespread Tidal Chaos and natural disasters as the moon is thrown into a random direction away from planet thedas. ghilan'nain was mentioned to have all kinds of deep sea creatures, that would probably be disturbed by this - thedas now has pacific rim style beasts coming out of the water and stomping around.
there's also the issue of, uhh. where is the moon going?? and is it coming back? personally i do not know about astronomy, but i think the coolest option is that the moon gets further and further away for a while, becoming very small in the sky, and then rapidly getting much bigger. the last surviving thedas astronomers (probably in tevinter, bc it's the diplomatic hub <3) announce that the moon is going to fully crash into the earth and obliterate it within a few decades at most. this causes mass panic and religious crises.
and this is when the ragged pathetic mortal squad + reva, dredge solas out of the black city and try to fix the world one last time, in the shadow of all these compounding mistakes that have led to unavoidable doom.
i got tagged by @virshiral! here is solas having a really Normal Reaction after running into mihris <3
"No need to show off on the kid's behalf," Tethras says.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to."
"Come on. All that elfier-than-thou stuff - don't you get tired of it? I'm tired just watching it."
Bitterness would be unfair, directed at whatever lonely, Stone-severed sort of dwarf Tethras is. And, yet. Fairness is not something he's ever managed to find or cultivate in any great measure, in all his years on earth.
"I was not aware it was competitive to speak my own language, Master Tethras," he replies, voice a little cold.
Tethras clicks his tongue. "Touchy enough to play dumb! Nevermind, then." He gives a magnanimous wave of his hand. "Go on. Don't let me get in the way - should I hold up a scorecard?"
How charming. How glib. It would be a waste of the dwarf's limited time; as Solas has already failed, and the People have already lost, over and over, by any possible measure. Unfair bitterness sharpens to equally unfair irritation.
"As insightful as your commentary is," Solas says, flatly. "I did not ask for it. Not all of us prefer to bare our chests and loudly proclaim our forgetfulness of where we came from."
Tethras flashes him a glittering smile. "Can't knock it until you try it, Chuckles."
i will tag @hallahart and @epiphany-jones if you feel like it ;o;
anyway sorry. this is what i mean by the smol bean fandom zionists
no actually! many people all over the world, from many backgrounds, and especially in occupied palestine, have to consider this fucking situation :)
furthermore, i love how people will completely engage in atrocity denial based on Fucking Tweets, and then simply not acknowledge it 2 minutes later when it turns out the evidence is incontrovertible. this is definitely the sign of a smart, free-thinking, moral society, tooootally different from a fascist regime like north korea. right. haha.
i saw this a while back and it was weighing on me still. do not ever do this when gming 😭 you are not writing a novel, where the audience can go "oouhh!!! that line 200 pages ago was actually foreshadowing!!!! you got me good!"
you are meeting a group of people once a week, at best!!! and they are also doing simple arithmetic/making jokes/eating snacks/looking at their character sheet/thinking of a fully different red herring that you never imagined, at the same time. you need like an obnoxious number of clues to even register for them, let alone be able to actually solve your mystery.
"sometimes i think i am very useless" just saying i go to ur blog weekly and make this face: :) so for me id say very useful but what the hell do i know
