From there the skulls ranged upward in size to the three great monsters of song and story, the dragons that Aegon Targaryen and his sisters had unleashed on the Seven Kingdoms of old.
They had been given the names of gods: Balerion, Meraxes, Vhagar.
Tyrion had stood between their gaping jaws, wordless and awed.
You could have ridden a horse down Vhagar’s gullet, although you would not have ridden it out again.
Meraxes was even bigger.
And the greatest of them, Balerion, the Black Dread, could have swallowed an aurochs whole, or even one of the hairy mammoths said to roam the cold wastes beyond the Port of Ibben.
Tyrion stood in that dank cellar for a long time, staring at Balerion’s huge, empty-eyed skull until his torch burned low, trying to grasp the size of the living animal, to imagine how it must have looked when it spread its great black wings and swept across the skies, breathing fire.
Through the Crossroads [DLC Trespasser]: The Darvaarad - Part2
The Darvaarad [Qunari term for a magical quarantine site] is a Qunari island fortress controlled by the branch of Ben-Hassrath called “Dangerous Purpose” who are lead by Viddasala. The Qunari in the Darvaarad investigate inner workings of the eluvians and brought in, catalogued and studied various artefacts, including red lyrium, astrariums, ocularum, ancient elven statues and murals. They stockpiled knowledge and power, which allowed them to open several mirrors.
This place is divided in the exterior areas:
Fortress Approach
Courtyard
Research Tower
And the interior areas:
Darvaarad Barracks
Study
Gaatlok Factory
Venom Extraction Chamber
[This is part of the series “Playing DA like an archaeologist”]
[Index page of Dragon Age Lore]
Darvaarad Barracks
As we continue exploring this place, we see that they have a Vault door system that made me remember the Dwarven engineering we saw in the Awakening expansion when we reached the gates built by the dwarves under Vigil's Keep to keep the darkspawn at bay.
Cole drops here one of his lines, implying what we will know by Solas' words: the energy of the Anchor is the energy of the Veil, accumulated by millennia, so this piece of energy that the Anchor is and the Veil try to be together.
The exploration of the barracks have not much to offer.
There is a unique statue that according to the book Art of Inquisition, they belong to Ferelden art, even though I was a bit inclined to think these were part of the Qunari decoration. Of course, there are banners of the Qun everywhere.
The interior architecture of the fortress keeps showing Ferelden style. Haven had a lot of these details, specially in its basement.
Study
We find a study room where more artefacts can be seen:
We find elements that we had seen a lot in DAI, DA2 and even DAO, like these books with the windmill drawing. There is an elvhen artefact, and a very strange ball which glows in green and one may suspect it related to the Fade.
In this study we read several codices: Letters and Replies, where we see a series of letter that Josephine sent to the Triumvirate of the Qunari, who claims that the Viddasala took her own initiative to lead the operation of Dragon Breath without their approval. We also find the Dragon Breath Plan and Orders Posted in the Factory where we learn the recipe for the primers of gaatlok [big secret along the whole series of DA games].
On the main desk of the study we see a Tevinter mini-Inspector in front of the skull of the dragon.
Leaving the study and heading to the Factory of Gaatlock, we see along the corridors some side cells where we find objects like “injectors” which glow with a yellowish energy, so they may have still some kind of power, and Dragon skulls.
Gaatlok Factory and Venom Extraction Chamber
At the end of the corridor, we find a big room where a dragon is kept prisoner. Close to this place we find Animal Handler's Logbook: written by a human woman recently joined to the Qun. Here we learn that one of the components of the Gaatlok is dragon venom. We see again that the qunari appreciate the dragons, calling it Ataashi, as Iron Bull did in the game.
Once we deal with the Dragon, we cross the bridge where we find the Viddasala and several qunari in front of the eluvian that will direct us to the abandoned elven City. Behind the eluvian there is a Golden Ring and a pair of mosaics of Fen'Harel.
Here, we realise that the Qunari think that Solas is an agent of Fen'Harel. It's interesting that the Qunari know that agents of Fen'Harel gave Corypheus the access to the elvhen orb.
Slowly the shapes around her took on form. Huge empty eyes stared at her hungrily through the gloom, and dimly she saw the jagged shadows of long teeth. She had lost the count. She closed her eyes and bit her lip and sent the fear away. When she looked again, the monsters would be gone. Would never have been. She pretended that Syrio was beside her in the dark, whispering in her ear. Calm as still water, she told herself. Strong as a bear. Fierce as a wolverine. She opened her eyes again. The monsters were still there, but the fear was gone.
When he had first come to King’s Landing for his sister’s wedding to Robert Baratheon, he had made it a point to seek out the dragon skulls that had hung on the walls of Targaryen’s throne room.
King Robert had replaced them with banners and tapestries, but Tyrion had persisted until he found the skulls in the dank cellar where they had been stored.
He had expected to find them impressive, perhaps even frightening. He had not thought to find them beautiful. Yet they were.
As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer in the light of his torch. They liked the fire, he sensed.
He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of the larger skulls and made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him.
The teeth were long, curving knives of black diamond.
The flame of the torch was nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater fires.
When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the beast’s empty eye sockets had watched him go.
The oldest was more than three thousand years old; the youngest a mere century and a half.
The most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger than a mastiff’s skulls, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone.
They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long.
