So is it just me, or is there a suspicious similarity between the surface-dwarven story of Fairel, Paragon of Paragons, and the interwoven story of Fen’Harel, aka Solas? The first inscription about Fairel says “from pride these halls were made,” which pings with the fact that “solas” literally means “pride” - as does the similarity between the names Fairel and Fen’Harel.
Like. All through Inquisition, it feels like we’re getting little hints that the various creation stories of the different groups in Thedas, but especially the elves, dwarves and the chantry, are really one story being told in different ways, in fragments that have corroded in the absence of a whole. So you get the similarities between the Golden City and Arlathan, which may well be the same place - and then there’s Fairel’s ruins, which are meant to predate the Blight.
When you go into the first ruin, there’s demons bound into the stone there, with notes from the Venatori wondering how the dwarves did it, and that makes a contrast with the dwarven expression about death meaning “returning to the Stone,” which is also how Fairel’s end is described. And given the whole thing about the Titans, with lyrium as their blood/bones and red lyrium meaning they’re infected with the Blight, that makes me wonder if the “Stone” as the dwarves understand it in the sense of a place to return to isn’t somehow another concept of Arlathan/the Golden City/the place before the Veil, especially as demons are described as “stone-waste” in old dwarven.
And just. The whole thing about the old gods I find very fascinating, because Mythal/Flemeth survives in a series of human bodies and Solas doesn’t actually *like* the elves, even though he ostensibly is one, and all the old stories about the ancient gods of Tevinter etc, and Morrigan’s son having the soul of an old god and being able to hear the Titans - what if ALL those gods are a different people who just adopted and/or created the various peoples of Thedas after the fact? That would explain how Solas could be both Fen’Harel and Fairel, and why Flemeth has never bothered to try and appear elven.
(Also, sidebar: I totally understand why people get mad about Morrigan elfsplaining elven history to a Dalish Inquisitor, but I also feel like her obsession with elves is tied to the fact that she’s Flemeth’s daughter, and Flemeth is literally an elven goddess in a human body. Even if Morrigan never knew that, her whole identity and being are clearly shaped by her mother’s magic at a fundamental level, so I feel like she’s maybe inherited this nameless, urgent sense of elven kinship without ever knowing why until Mythal reveals herself.)
Hissing Wastes: Perseverance and A journal on Dwarven Ruins.
Exploring this desert we find a spirit of Perseverance and pieces of a journal that reconstruct the many situations that a scholar experienced as well as their interpretation of what they found in the ruins.
Perseverance
This is a nice small detail in the region that I personally enjoyed. We find a woman reciting religious words in four opportunities. She is mysterious, appears out of nowhere, and speaks alone.
It’s curious this spirit chose that shape. My guess is that, like Cole or the spirit we met in the Fade with the shape of Justinia, this spirit may have found something valuable in a Chantry sister who may have come to this desert to spread the word of the Maker. We know that the Chantry believes that the Maker will see his children again when his word has been spread across all Thedas. She must have thought it was a good idea to spread the Maker’s word in this desert [if that’s not perseverance I don’t know what it is]. Probably she must have died due to the hard conditions or the dangerous wild life living here, but the spirit, moved by the sister’s perseverance, took her role.
As we persevere in our task, trying to get all the fragments of the key that opens Fairel’s tomb, she appears before the inquisitor four times.
Solas at first does not notice her true nature. He claims she is harmless but clearly there is something odd to her.
The last time we meet her, she gives us a reward: a bow called perseverance, which form is the same one than Elgan’ar’s blessing’s [another bow]. Quite a choice for a reuse, uhn. The inscription of the item reminds me Flemeth’s words. “I’ve suffered, as the world has suffered”. If I’m allowed to do a little of speculation, maybe it’s a very bland hint of Mythal being close to the nature of a spirit of perseverance, in the same way Solas is close to the nature of a spirit of Wisdom.
She disappears, glowing in green, and Solas’ “of course” gives us all the information we need to be more than sure that this entity was a spirit of perseverance. I don’t know, I like it, the whole quest has a Neil Gaiman’s flavour to it, no?
Hissing Wastes: A journal on Dwarven Ruins
This is a very long, ongoing codex that gets updated with each page you find all over the region. Exploration is rewarded with this codex, pretty much like the codex of The Enigma of Kirkwall in DA2.
It starts when we enter the Hissing Wastes, since it activates automatically The Hissing Wastes, where a third-year student from the University of Orlais [we know later this is Felicity's sister] talks to Felicity trying to convince her not to go to the Hisssing Wastes due to the danger and inhospitable conditions. This is the letter than convinced Felicity not to accompany the dwarven scholar who wrote this codex ["I wish Felicity's sister hadn't talked her out of joining me"] .
A Journal on Dwarven Ruins relates a lot of interesting things that can be summarised as:
This dwarven person came to this place with the only purpose of investigating the old surface thaig.
We don’t know the name of this person, but we know they had a dwarven grandmother who taught them old dwarven language. Sounds like a scholar since they speak about world-famous treaties. They seem to know the struggles of the scholar world.
They wonder immediately onto two options when it comes to the old surface thaig. They consider that the "commonly known fact" that dwarves never built cities on the surface is wrong, given the evidence in this region [very scholar and very objective, questioning what's considered a fact for so long simply because Evidence is saying otherwise] or that it was made by some people who imitated dwarves.
Hundreds of years ago, before the First Blight, several houses left their thaigs to settle down on the surface place under the leadership of a paragon: master smith Paragon Fairel
They don't know if these clans left the underground running away from a war, or to prevent it.
The Shaperate recorded Fairel as dead in the Deep Roads during a war between two thaigs that were using his runecraft to develop weapons of destruction. Clearly, this is a lie or a half-truth.
This scholar analyses heraldry on drawings he found on some of the ruins: they see weapons with winged lizards worked into the decoration [could it be one of the (winged) reptiles in the commonly known symbol of Tevinter]. Translation of the inscriptions may suggest that this thaig struggled a lot with fire-breathing dragons, reason why they developed these weapons that this scholar sees.
This scholar met Perseverance, this spirit that appears in different places of this region. Considering the way she presented herself to the inquisitor, we can assume she must have been touched by the scholar’s perseverance in their study of the ruins. I loved that detail.
They discover Fariel's tomb in the East but can't open the door, since they need to collect all the pieces of the key that the Inquisitor ends up doing.
This person recognises that the tombs that the Venatori are digging have ancient style.
Sadly this person was attacked by spiders and it seems their wounds were infected [”[they are] hot to the touch”]. They discovered the name of the Thaig: Kal Repartha: "A place where we may meet in peace."
The last part of this journal is found in a small Venatori camp, which I consider it means that the dwarf was found by the Venatori, probably with fever, and they may have killed them or used their blood for fuelling their spells, as one of the slaves they met before had warned them. I think this scholar is dead by now, even though we don’t have certainty about it.
Alongside with the Journal on Dwarven Ruins, we find letters and orders in most of the small encampments set around the tombs that the Venatori are digging. They are more chaotic than the journal, and can be summarised as:
The letters are mostly between Estoris, Hatrmmonum, Avanthum, Sellanus, Vertis, Devrenix and Magisters Urathus; Members of the Venatori.
Estoris seems to lead several digs at the same time.
Avanthum seems to be a scholar on ancient dwarven ruins. They had located all these ruins and, by reading the texts, knows that they are pre-blights: “They predate 700 TE” [The first blight is around 800 TE]
Vertis seems to be a precious slave for his knowledge, since there are orders about not making him work hard, since he cost them a fortune.
They found the exact place where the dwarves came out from the underground [ in A Blocked Doorway, the image above]. Fairel and his people collapsed the lower levels, giving no chance to return to the underground.
More details about this in the post of Fairel’s tomb.
The Venatori are using slaves for all the work in the desert. I was hoping to find a dwarven one, assuming they could be this scholar whose journal we have been reading all along, but it seems they must have died already.
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