The Ancient Jail is an abandoned jail, occupied by strange elven statues and shattered mirrors. There is almost no more information to get from it. It’s an ancient mystery.
[This is part of the series “Playing DA like an archaeologist”]
[Index page of Dragon Age Lore]
From the Isle that heads to the Shattered Library we can activate a dragon egg that will allow us to reach this place. It’s seems strange that the statue of Dragon Mythal is here. There are some broken eluvian and a lot of skeletons.
We know this eluvian leads to a jail, but why this decoration? Is this a jail the place where Mythal put those who angered her? All those that had done wrong doings to other elves and asked Mythal for revenge, as the Altar of Mythal seems to suggest? Mythal as a dragon seems to represent her aggressive, furious aspect, while her humanoid form her just aspect. This would explain why we see her humanoid form inside her Temple, a place of Justice; while the dragon form is repeated all around her Altar, a place where petitioners ask for revenge, or outside her Temple, to defend it]. Finding this dragon statue here, beside the eluvian, could represent a message to intimidate the prisoners before entering the jail.
As we enter, the first thing we see is a pair of murals: the shifting halla or bound halla, and the black halla with the marked elves [more on this Nation Art: Elvhen]. The architecture of this place feels a very standard Ferelden castle.
There are several broken eluvians and a broken Howling Fen'Harel statue. There is some Dalish iconography too. Honestly, this place is a big mystery, and I can’t find a way to wrap most of the elements in a more or less coherent interpretation.
The cells are filled with many skeletons, showing that there was an overpopulation of prisoners in these cells. On the ground, there is a Golden Halla and on the wall, a part of an icon that, I suspect, it’s a reuse of an asset.
The original icon represented the outlaw party in the Hinterlands, but by the way it’s shown in the wall, seems to be focused on “squeezing a snake”, which escapes my interpretation, since this is ancient elvhenan time... it cannot be a representation of Tevinter: there were no humans in the world yet.
On the other side of the corridor we find another Dragon Mythal statue, more cells, and more broken eluvian. Clearly this cell was connected to a lot of places given the amount of eluvians it once had.
The painting of a golden halla aims to where we find 2 destroyed eluvians. Maybe an indication to the Forgotten Sanctuary? Hard to know.
Close to the Golden Halla, we find a Crumpled Page. Again, we are left with almost no information.
The language of the note is unknown to us, which seems alarmingly strange, specially for an inquisitor who drank from the Well of Sorrows. So maybe this is not Elven in any way, but an ancient language of another race?
Since the note humiliates the jailer [making him farting and crossed-eyed], it must have been written by a prisoner. So, if we cannot understand the language, this implies that some of these prisoners were not elves.
This only brings a curious implication: during the elvhenan empire, the only other race that existed, so far we were told via codices, was the dwarves as servants of titans. So, the further we can conclude in this place is that some dwarves may have been taken prisoners in here. Certainly, the vulgarity of the note seems to fit more a dwarf than an elf, if the ancient versions of these races still keep some cultural aspects of the modern ones.
When we open the chest at the end of the corridor, some Greater Terror demons appear; probably the main demons fed by these prisoners. After defeating them we can have access to another item of The Taken Shape set and the completion of the codex explained already in that post.
In general, I feel completely lost in this space. We can’t grasp what this jail was about, and there is no material or evidence to work on. Some elvhen were jailed here, since we see the elvhen paintings that may suggest elvhes trapped for experimentation or branding [the black halla with vallaslin elves inside her, and the shifting halla]. But there is also a very unrelated painting of the outlaws [the squeezed snake], and the note that gives us the certainty that some prisoners were not elvhen because their language is something that the Well of Sorrow can’t translate. Maybe these prisoners were related to this strange squeezed snake. Maybe they were dwarves, since it’s the only other humanoid race that we know existed during the elvhenan kingdom. And all this place is decorated with the intimidating form of Mythal as a dragon. This is very, very mysterious.
