Is the reason they never brought back the Warden main character from Origins because they were a voiceless character? I hope there were more reasons than just that because it wouldnt have been that hard to give them a voice in later games
They were technically a voiced character, and they'd say things on occasion...it's just that there were so many different voice sets to choose from -- 36 in all -- I'm not surprised they never came back.
(Fun fact: Ain's is the same VA as Sapphire. Same as this mage who he pretty much sounds like, only drier and grumpier.)
Post-Veilguard, in light of the Blight being calmed and the Callings coming to an end.
---
The notice arrives late on a Sunday afternoon. There’s two letters, one bearing each of their names, and they open them standing around the foyer as the cats watch cautiously from the other room, disturbed by the arrival and departure of a strange man in blue and white armor.
Anders gets a paragraph in, swallows hard. “Is...is yours the same as…”
Ain nods.
“The Calling?”
Ain nods, never looking up.
Anders finishes his notice first. Lowers it to his side, exhales a long, slow breath, and says, in the voice of a man who was at peace with the alternative...
“Well, then...at least that’s one less thing I can expect to die of. What do you make of it?” Ain’s eyes, however, remain transfixed upon his letter. They reach the end, only to start back at the beginning, golden-browns darting, twice and then once more. Anders’ smile fades. “...Ain?”
The former Warden-Commander turns without a word and goes to stand out the back garden, where the Antivan thyme grows and the railing overlooks the sea. Anders follows hurriedly, padding barefoot after him, and finds him staring out at the horizon, expression as unreadable as fog on the bay. As he watches the wind shift his partner's dark curls, he remembers everything Ain’s ever told him about his Joining; how he was only 16 years old, never knowing the true cost. How he never spoke of it, never voiced regret, only did everything like he was running out of time.
“Ain, talk to me, please. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Finally, Ain does. And though his tone is as calm and steady as ever, a voice that's shot down Templars and soothed Amaranthine mobs, Anders thinks he sees a distinct shine upon his eyes.
“I’m thinking that we head into town, and have dinner at that place overlooking the city...the one where we had the fish ribs. I'm thinking we linger as long as we please over coffee, and on the way back we pick up something for the cats at the market, and when we get home, we lock the doors and I kiss every last inch of your body. Does that suit you?”
Anders exhales his second sigh of slow, glorious relief that day. It will most certainly not be the last.
"Measured and fitted, Fearless Leader."
***
When the summons arrives at the Grand Cathedral, the rain has been falling all morning. A light, warm drizzle, the kind that puts buds on fruit trees and wheat in fields, so very needed on a hungry south wounded by war and infected by Blight. It’s a drizzle that says the wet, sucking mud will go in time, and the grass will come again, and that someday, perhaps sooner than they think, they’ll all taste wine and cheese and butter on bread once more.
Leliana, despite knowing everything that comes and goes in the cathedral she’s seated out of, only learns of it when she finds her wife sobbing on the ground.
“Itha? Itha!” she implores, hitting her knees, taking Itha’s tattooed face between her hands. She tries to recall the last time Itha’s grief was greater than the strength it took to rise up off her knees and her mind goes back decades...back to when Tamlen died, to Malkuth, to the night they mourned Alistair together. “Look at me, dearest! What happened?!”
Itha wordlessly passes her the notice. Free arm tight around her partner’s small, quaking shoulders, Leliana takes the vellum, reads it hurriedly. Before the end, her hands are trembling.
“Oh, my darling...”
And suddenly they’re both crying, right there on the marble floor of the most holy and opulent building in the south. By the time the servants realize and come running, they’ve made their way outside, hang appearances and hang the weather. The staff can only stand in the doorway, watching Divine Justinia in her robes and the Hero of Ferelden, two middle aged women laughing and crying and spinning around and around in the rain that's soaked them to their bones.
Knowing -- finally, at long, long last -- that they have the rest of their lives to warm up again.
Female glory holes are extremely common in Orlais. Far from home and dealing with a lot of complicated stuff, Ain paid them a couple of visits way back in the day.
As a much younger man, Emmrich also had a fondness for them.
Dragon Age Origins Awakenings Appreciation Week: Last Day
Did your Warden Commander save Amaranthine during the attack?
Hell yes he did. Got his belly ripped open by an ogre for his trouble -- had that sucker stitched up, took a salt tablet, and charged off to the Dragonbone Wastes to kick some ass.
In all seriousness, that did nearly kill him.
How did your Warden Commander respond in Witch Hunt to Morrigan? What if they were romanced to Morrigan before that? What if they survived the Arch Demon and were friends with Morrigan?
Itha took that one due to the fact that she hates the Wardens and by extension Ain. She wasn’t about to let some little brat bother Morrigan, who’s like a sister to her and also saved her and Alistair’s lives.
They had a happy reunion and Morrigan and the dog had a happy reunion and everyone was happy and I was happy. Although Itha was sorry to see her take off a second time, she knew she had big things planned. And she knew that the kid was in good hands.
How did your Warden Commander respond to Finn and Ariane?
Itha has a tendency to forget they exist, largely because I do.
Did your Warden Commander make the deal with the Architect?
Yeah, no, Ain killed the hell out of the Architect.
The farmer had been a little man, skeptical as Amaranthine farmers tend to be, but willing to give life under the Wardens its fair run. He had also been exceedingly grateful to have that tunnel to the Deep Roads caved in and blocked, but lacking in the coin to properly convey it. All he’d had to offer were what seemed to be an excessive amount of apricots -- four bushels in total, enough to raise the possibility that he’d simply wanted to unload excess apricots before they rotted through and ruined the basket. But considering he was under no strict obligation to pay anything at all, Ain had been glad enough to take them and pass them along to the castle cooks.
The choicest looking basket, however, he kept.
“You gonna eat all those yourself?” Oghren had said, eyeing up the sunny looking heap of fruit.
“Yes, Oghren. I’m going to lock myself in my quarters and eat apricots for 72 hours straight.”
“I would.”
So there they all were, on the softest hillside Vigil’s Keep had to offer, eating apricots warmed by the blazing sun and fattened by the fertile soils running off from the marsh. There were places to be, things to be done, darkspawn to be slain and nobles to be soothed.
And for once, it all could wait.
Justice had taken his blade to one of the apricots and was holding it up to the light like some ancient wonder. “So much force required to break into such a small heart,” he mused to absolutely no one in particular. “And no reward save bitterness, bitterness and poison. It’s what comes of not leaving well enough alone.”
Nathaniel and Velanna sat shoulder to shoulder, fingers gently overlapping, as if daring anyone to say anything about it. Oghren sprawled like a dead toad in the sun, quite heedless of the juice smearing his beard, occasionally popping kernels at Sigrun. He got off about four good shots before she rounded on him, smiling jeopardously.
“Hit me in the eye again and guess where the next one’s going?”
“I can think of a couple, all of ‘em kinky.”
“Ugh. Honestly, Oghren? Go piss up a nug.”
“Hah, that’s a new one! Whatever butters your biscuit, woman!”
“Enough,” the Commander chastised lazily, never bothering to open his eyes. “Sigrun, don’t weaponize the apricot kernels. Oghren, piss up a nug.”
He couldn’t find it in himself to muster anything sterner; not on an afternoon like that. And when he cracked his eye, there was Anders, sweating under the mass of orange fur lounging across his chest and idly playing with a stray paw.
“We should really do this more often,” the mage suggested in that languid, bright eyed, hopeful way that Ain was most certainly not weak against, thank you very much.
“Don’t count on it. I’ll be paying for this later.”
“I mean, we did destroy a high dragon’s ghost and free a bunch of spirits. One might say we earned it. And that apple season is coming.” He grinned. “And did I mention you look remarkably striking from this angle?”
“You’re a wretched influence.” He took his lover’s chin in hand, tilted his head upwards, and did not lean down the way he would have if they weren’t surrounded on all sides by their companions. But the intention was there, and Anders’ lovely golden eyes hooded as he read it loud and clear. “...I’ll think about it.”
Three days later, the city of Amaranthine came under attack. Three days later, they would all stand in a room together for the last time.
Here we are, Dragon Age Origins Awakenings Appreciation Week: Day 6
Questions of the Day:
How did your Warden Commander respond to the Wending Wood?
The Wending Wood always unnerved Ain even before it gave him a solid reason to feel that way. Orlais is full of old, creepy, actively malevolent forests (and Rivain’s are full of snakes) and none of them put him on his toes the way it does.
It’s one thing to feel like a forest doesn’t want you there. The Wending Wood feels like it’s aggressively given up on the world and everyone in it.
How did your Warden Commander respond to meeting Velanna?
Meeting Velanna was probably his first clue to get the hell out of dodge, but at the time, it seemed like a relatively simple solution to a sadly typical problem. Dalish elf is out for revenge, turns out the darkspawn took her sister? Fine, Ain’s met a lot of people whose relatives were taken by darkspawn. Best to try to find her, see what they can do for her, maybe put a dent in this larger darkspawn problem.
(Fun fact: Younger siblings is about the only common ground Ain and Velanna share.)
Velanna, what sort of relationship does your Warden Commander have with Velanna?
They never did learn to be best friends. Velanna needed to be a Warden and Ain needed Wardens, and apart from the aforementioned bonding over siblings, that was all it really amounted to.
Just when they were starting to really warm up to each other, the final fight with the Architect happened. They had an absolutely vicious argument over it and never spoke again.
How did your Warden Comander respond to being kidnapped?
Hoo boy. Hoooo, boy.
The Architect is Ain’s personal white whale and there’s no getting around it...a large part of that is due to what happened in the Silverite Mines. It shook him up on so, so many levels.
How quickly it all happened, and all the ways it could have been prevented in hindsight. That brief, startling moment of clarity on the surgical table -- that this was it, the end of the line, Oghren and Anders are going to be eaten and he and Velanna will be turned into Brood Mothers. The fact that that didn’t happen, but the Architect still cut them, bled them like animals, and presumably handled his naked body. The starkness of that cell, and knowing that the only reason his people didn’t end up dead that day was because Seranni happened to let them out. And then, because there’s no kill like overkill, finding Keenan -- who he apparently took the Joining with, but whose face he can’t even remember -- mangled and dying in the ruins.
It’s tangled and awful and he has no interest in sorting out all the words for it, but the end result is the same...that day, down in the dark, he lost something he couldn’t get back.
Prompts of the Day:
The Wending Wood, adventures in the Wending Wood, the ruins in the Wending Wood, etc.
Two incisions, parallel to the arm, about an inch long. Unmistakably intended as cuts (perhaps a cannula would have taken more time than the creature was willing to spare) but clean and precise and already brushed over with a healing spell. And it was the paradoxical nature of that precision that made it all so surreal.
How could the creature have seen fit to bleed them, wipe the blood from their wounds, dress their arms, then lay them on a cold cell floor beside a freshly dead dwarf? Just what sort of fate had sensed them, tasted the air for them, and passed them by?
“The Hero of Ferelden always kept a couple of little poison pills on her,” Oghren had said, tone eerily sober. “Just in case the darkspawn ever managed to take her alive.”
Velanna did not turn from her task of scouring the cell for an escape route. Anders, however, looked up from where he knelt beside their leader’s unconscious form, cycling through every reversal spell the Circle had taught him. “Why would she do that?”
“You ever seen a pregnant darkspawn, kid? They’ve gotta come from somewhere.”
The door sticks, and it takes four solid, heavy, frantic hits before it gives way in a shower of dirt and rust. They all lurch forward, drawing deep, disbelieving breaths of fresh air and light and the scent of a world in full bloom. When the group descended into those tunnels a lifetime ago, it was mid-morning. The sun still hangs well above the horizon now, but inches lower by the minute, casting short, fat shadows.
The exit to the mines lies behind them; the corner they rounded, their footprints in the dust. Ain glances back at it just once.
“Everyone keep close together. We need to be out of these woods by nightfall, and then we’ll need to be in touch with Nathaniel. Make sure he made it out safely as well.”
His voice is too even, too measured...like a pot shattered on the floor, barely held together with wet glue. His gauntleted fingers shift as discreetly as possible to the gold ring on its chain, the one he had so violently snatched off the darkspawn that wore his armor, and clutch it like a lifeline in a storm.
They march back the way they came. Oghren inspects his axe, loudly comments on the “nug suckers” who “grubbed it up”, while Velanna sets her jaw and keeps a measured distance. Anders hangs in between, well aware that the commander who laughs with him at night and the figure striding briskly on ahead in heavy armor are two very different people. They stop along Pilgrim’s Path, buy hand pies and cider from the sleepy looking vendor, and eat them while walking, and it’s only then -- bolstered by the great, depleted bites their leader is taking -- that he decides to chance it.
“You alright, commander?”
“Well, it’s always a chance, venturing into closed quarters with the darkspawn. The important thing is, we got out unharmed. But it was an inexcusable, novice mistake and rest assured, one I will not be making again. You have my word on that.”
“Ahh, good to know!” Anders replies cautiously. “...So, are you alright?”
“...Quite. Thank you.”
They make it home to Vigil’s Keep and all that awaits them there... the peasants at the gates, and the commander soothing them as efficiently as if he’d spent the day preparing a speech; finding Nathaniel alive and well and helping to cart stones for the wall; Oghren trundling off to the loving, supportive arms of his ale, and Velanna buckling down for the next day’s Joining. Anders sets Ser-Pounce-a-lot on the ground, and by the time he looks up, the commander is gone.
Only years later, across a gouged table at a backwater inn, will Ain confess to him that he spent a portion of that night curled in on himself, scrubbing his skin red, and the rest of it failing to sleep.
“For the first time, I wanted nothing more than to run home. Felt that I had no business being where I was. Couldn’t contemplate putting on the uniform and coming down to face you all.”
Anders, older and wearier, can only take his hand.
