An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Summary: You descend into the depths and find what you never knew you lost
Feb. 12th Love of DA 2026 prompt: Brightest in the Dark
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Honestly i’ve been working on fumes lately, so this is all I got for this one. But it was an experiment since I really like The Descent DLC. Short and to the point. ~500 words. read below the cut or on Ao3.
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Being down here in the Deep Roads… it does something to a person unused to living without a sky.
It eats at the edges of your psyche, nibbling at consciousness, and fraying the bits of control you've thus far taken for granted.
For a surface dwarf, it's considered a twisted kind of boon.
A chance to return to the stone, to spend your last moments in rectitude among those your parents were told they should have never left.
But down this deep, beyond where only wardens go in their final days?
It's a blight all its own.
Time blurs. Direction becomes inconsequential. And all you live for is a chance to see something. Anything.
There's an oppressive weight to the dark down here. Stifling. Suffocating. The kind that gets inside and starts to strip you of your sanity from the inside out.
Stone.
More stone.
Spider corpse. Skeleton.
Another rock.
On and on and on.
And the quiet? It's maddening and you start to talk to yourself, just to ease the ache of missing connection.
Or hum. Humming is fine. Your voice isn't one for the taverns or theaters, but in the silence it's the sweetest song.
Until the other song joins in with its haunting harmony.
You don't know when it started, but it's there, coming from the stone. From the air. From the dark.
From inside your head.
For a while you scramble about, terrified of the sound of it. The soothing allure of the notes that feels like coming home and falling into an abyss at the same time.
You follow. You must. To do otherwise would be to deny an ache that was ripped from your essence before consciousness was formed.
Then you see it.
The glow.
The veining of lyrium threading through stone and pulsing with a heartbeat some part of you recognizes.
And it's beautiful.
So intoxicating to behold you don't see the eyes watching you until their voices join with yours in the melody you didn't realize you'd been singing.
Tears run down your cheeks at the overwhelm, the sheer pleasure that ripples down your spine. You're so lost in the sensation you barely notice the hands guiding you to a table and laying you down.
The vibrations of the resonant rhythms raise gooseflesh along your limbs and you welcome the bindings affixed to your wrists and ankles as here amongst your own, your ancient kin carve the notes into your bones, smelt the liquid cadence to metal so it might fuse directly to skin.
Becoming one.
A joining of soul to body in eternal perfection. A lover's embrace but of self. Of deepest abiding acceptance that this is who you should have always been.
It is an ecstasy of mind that can only be found here in the Bastion of the Pure. For it is here that it called you, to know you intimately.
Because down here, your lifeblood shines brightest in the dark.
i can't properly express how thoroughly let down i am, that the single most interesting part of the Descent, the Sha-Brytol, were just reduced to simple mobs to fight. Like, we didn't even get a chance to talk to them. Not even an attempt. i need to know more, Bioware. Pleeeease, please give me a morsel of information
Dwarven design is well known by its geometrical style and, despite keeping squared, it differs significantly from the pointy--also geometrical--Tevinter design, even though sometimes one wonders if both cultures have some small design overlaps, specially in the architecture when it comes to frame doors.
This series of posts are not exhaustive since I’ve developed a very detailed list of tags tracking certain features of a given design. These posts merely try to gather in one place the symbols and elements I used most of the time when identifying buildings in my analysis of DAI.
[This post is part of the series “Patterns and Styles ”]
[Index page of Dragon Age Lore]
Patterns
Dwarves have only three patterns, maybe four, so far I’ve detected.
1- The first pattern is usually found in borders of columns of dwarven ruins. The tendency to a more square-ish design is clear.
2- The second patterns [green one] is a kind of a laying C with some detail inside it. If I trace it, we can see that the carved figure ends up looking similar to the “cup” of the pattern number 3.
These patterns are usually accompany with this one I call “square wave”.
3- The third pattern [brown one] is a sort of a “cup” with a semi-circle inside.
4- The fourth pattern that I’m not sure to whom associate it with is this one, usually seen in the superior border of ruin columns. I found it in Tevinter ruins as well as Dwarven buildings, and until a better identification, I would say that this pattern is Tevinter/Dwarvish.
Architecture
It’s hard to say anything special about the dwarven architecture: we already saw it so many times: enormous caves and gigantic columns decorated with geometrical patterns [some of the above]. Their buildings are carved into the stone, not made out of bricks, which is natural since they are a race that developed an underground culture. There are no windows in these buildings because, with the exception of Fairel, they were always meant to be underground.
Door frames are very square-ish, with geometrical patterns on it, and I can see them as part of the inspiration that Tevinter took to develop their own door frames.
These doors also have some writing in them that follows the square-based flavour.
Decoration
The decoration of the walls is always very geometrical, making contrasts with different types of stones or shades of the same stone, patterns and textures applied to the stone.
There are some long holes in the walls that many times are filled with molten rocks that help to have a natural light all along the Deep Roads. We have seen these in different shape in DAO, DA2 and DAI.
Every corridor is decorated with [one or many of] the patterns commented above.
Among the most curious elements found in places of exclusive dwarven presence is the “dwarven seat”, which has very swirly-rounding elements that makes it very atypical for a dwarven object. This element was commented in detail in “Patterns and Styles: Elvhenan”.
Another curious decorative element that has been present since DAO is the Dwarven analogous Elven Tree Statue which is made in Dwarven style.
We find this element for the first time in DAO, in Orzammar. I think it’s pretty obvious its link to the spherical elvhen trees, and therefore, to Titans, showing from early time [DAO time!] that the relationship between dwarven and elvhenan via Titans have been part of the original design of this lore instead of being a “later unrelated addition” to it.
If these trees represents for the Elvhenan the power that lyrium gives them, which is related to the heart [circulatory system] of a titan, it also makes sense why dwarves will have this object in their decorations: as a reminder of their own origin, of the source they were cut off long time ago. In previous posts I also linked this spherical tree with a potential interpretation of the heart of a Titan, which reinforces all these concepts even more.
Finally, the last decorative item of quite interesting value are the set of Dwarven stone-paintings. The first one was seen in DA2, featuring the Gallows. The second one belongs to DAO, as part of the decoration we can see in Orzammar; it’s a drawing that features the dwarves and their relationship with The Stone. Curiously, the drawing has a low-key design that may suggest a sun in the background.
The third one is original from DAI, never seen in previous games. It features a unique tower that, considering the stalactites on the top [which can be interpreted as stalagmites or merely mountains], could be understood as an upside-down image, where the ground is on the top.
In that case, we obtain something that looks similar to a tower that was constructed hanging from above.
This structure makes me remember The Wellspring.
More details about dwarven decoration can be found in tags such as Dwarven sarcophagus, Dwarven stone-paintings, and Dwarven design.
Sha-Brytol decoration
As an extra detail, I like to highlight the curious design of what little we saw about the Sha-Brytol. I think that lore-wise, we can consider the Sha-Brytol as “ancient dwarves” if not disconnected dwarves that may have something in common with modern dwarven. They may have elements that modern dwarven kept without truly knowing what that means [as usually these things work with the passage of time]. In their corresponding posts, we talked a lot about the differences we saw with respect to modern dwarven.
Design-wise, modern dwarven display more square-based shapes,
while the Sha-Brytol create impressions of square shapes by using two triangles or triangular shapes. Even the squarish spirals of modern dwarven design are done in a triangular way by the Sha-Brytol. The presence of black metal with the form of spikes and claws is quite noticeable too, and it’s a detail that keeps linking these creatures with some resemblance to Tevinter design.
Another of these details is present in the decoration of the Sha-brytol bridges which, by using dwarven patterns and Tevinter claws, manage to create a pyramid-triangle figure.
More details about Sha-Brytol design can be found in
OK OK listen listen hear me out... so... I just finished the descent again. And like- SO-
So Lyrium is the blood of the titans. Yes. Ok. And the Titans consider the dwarves their children. Valta says so, she is recognised by the Titan like she’s it’s child. And she hears it’s song, like all dwarves can hear the song of lyrium and have a stone sense. And they can find it and mine it that way. And Lyrium when ingested gives powers but can also become addictive, can have effects on cognitive function, Sandal exists.. Right? Right...
What if... the Darkspawn are to the Archdemons a corrupted version of what the dwarves are to the Titans... They both hear a song... and that song is ‘foreign’ to the fade. Like how Justice reacts to Lyrium, he’s delighted by it but it’s also completely new to him, he’s never seen it before. And then Avernus claims that the Blight has power because it is completely other to the fade and demons, they do not know what to do with it. And since we know lyrium spreads and grows similar to how the blight spreads and grows... and Grey Wardens are created by drinking archdemon + darkspawn blood like the Sha-Brytol drink the ‘blood’ of the Titan!! When people drink just darkspawn blood, they die, but drinking Archdemon blood with it can mean they live and have powers, SIMILARLY to the dwarves ingesting mined lyrium and dying vs them drinking from the wellspring and getting powers! and of course we know that Lyrium can be corrupted, the red lyrium is literally a blighted Titan as far as we’re aware.
And of course, the Titan’s heart that we find in the Descent was sealed off to protect it from the Blight, it must have been. That’s why it discusses ‘the pure’ and why the Sha-Brytol kill anything on sight. Anything could be blighted and likely is, if it’s passed through the Deep Roads. The dwarves used to have powers unique to them but had to cut themselves off in order to protect the Titans from corruption. There MUST have been a point where the Titans were sealed off and then struck from the Memories in order to keep their people away. The only question is... when... because if it was entirely because of the Blight then the Dwarves were selling Lyrium to Tevinter LONG before they lost contact with the Titans. OH. OH. Endrin Stonehammer HAD a hammer that was enlaced with Lyrium!!! Just like the Sha-Brytol weapons and armour!!! THIS IS RAMBLING, DRAGON AGE DWARF LORE MAKE BRAIN GO BRRRR
not to call the master race elves out on main and intrude on the meta side of this fandom but the evanuris were colonizers that stole from titans and the theory that went around a while ago that “mythal saved the sha brytol from slavery by severing their link to the titans 🥺” is bullshit and i never wanna hear that shit again lol
a more appropriate theory would be that she ripped a child away from its mother and essentially made the dwarves their very own version of tranquil. she severed their link to the fade, which rendered them without magic, which stripped the titans of their guardians and gave the elves free reign to kill them and mine their blood to fuel their PaRaDiSe.
titans only make cities tremble when something is wrong. they were calling for help.
I said in this post I’d been thinking on the Profane and the Sha-Brytol and a possible connection with what we find in the Deep Roads in Trespasser, and that is what I’m going to tackle now. It’s going to be a very long post, which means I plan on putting some of it under a cut to save your dashes. (I’m doing this on desktop to try to ensure the cut happens, but if it doesn’t: I apologize and will fix when I figure out how.)
First, what we find in the Deep Roads in Trespasser.
There are a number of important (for this post) codex entries that you find as you are exploring and fighting the Viddasala’s men, but I want to begin with this one in the hidden Deep Roads mural room and how to find it if you have not in your own playthroughs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhu5jKSojuU
(What Mr. CodeSlinger doesn’t tell you is that there is a riddle/instructions just before you reach the wolf statue that you should read. The button and making the box lootable cannot happen if the statue is not facing the mural, and the statue does move and follow you about the room while your back is turned. A bit poetic, that.)
The rune you examine on the wall gives you the codex entry I linked above, but quoted here:
In the light of the veilfire, the runes seem to shift, coiling and uncoiling like snakes. A thunderous voice shatters the stillness, shouting:
"Hail Mythal, adjudicator and savior! She has struck down the pillars of the earth and rendered their demesne unto the People! Praise her name forever!"
For a moment, the scent of blood fills the air, and there is a vivid image of green vines growing and enveloping a sphere of fire.
The vision grows dark. An aeon seems to pass. Then the runes crackle, as if filled with an angry energy.
A new vision appears: elves collapsing caverns, sealing the Deep Roads with stone and magic.
Terror, heart-pounding, ice-cold, as the last of the spells is cast.
A voice whispers:
"What the Evanuris in their greed could unleash would end us all. Let this place be forgotten. Let no one wake its anger. The People must rise before their false gods destroy them all."
The wikia on this codex entry adds (bold emphasis mine):
The Inquisitor, upon reading the runes (if The Descent DLC was completed): "The runes say the Evanuris fought the Titans. They mined their bodies for lyrium and... something else. It's not clear."
Others who’ve explored the lore have theorized that the “something else” is Titan hearts based upon the mural in this room. I agree, it’s too compelling to be anything else. Specifically, Titan hearts used as Dreamer foci -- “Somnaborium” as Dorian says in party banter with Solas -- became the orbs the Evanuris had, including Fen’Harel/Solas (the Orb of Destruction Corypheus wields until the end of the main game). (I really like the potential tie-in with the Dread Wolf Rises mural, as explored by @wyrdsistersofthedas in this post. The signs and symbols are highly significant especially when created by the same artist, and the idol and questions raised in their post will be touched upon later in this post.)
Titans themselves are beings of unknowable power because they are allegedly asleep -- we only know of what they can do when they shift and thrash. What we do know is that lyrium, while sourced in the Fade like the wellspring of a river, ultimately finds its way through metaphysical means to Titans’ veins and hearts, which dwarves mine and mages and templars use. The gap from thought to manifestation may be the “key” or “heart” of a Titan heart’s/orb’s power and ability to enter the Fade at will, navigate it, and manipulate it.
However, the Titans may be waking.
Given the depiction in Solas’s Deep Roads mural and what was in the codex entry, the Mythal or the Evanuris “sundered” the Titans with the theft of their hearts and crippled them, but despite a lack of a heart they may not be dead but “crippled” and “polluted.” This leads me to thoughts of the Blight, naturally, but I’m sticking a pin in that thought for now. What I want to underscore and build upon is that the Evanuris effectively subjugated the Titans and they were rather dismissive of the “workers” -- dwarves -- being focused upon gathering power.
The rest of the codex entries you find in the Deep Roads in Trespasser begin to hint at the story, I believe, of what happened next.
Torn Notebook in the Deep Roads, Section 1: “Now the Qunari bring me down into the lightless depths, and for what? Because the nursery rhymes I remember from childhood make me an expert on ancient elves.These statues are old. Better shape than anything I've seen on the surface. Many of them are for Mythal, though. And Fen'Harel. Not in a spot of honor, but guarding, attending.Protector and All-Mother, why are you honored here, so far from the light of the sun? And why was the Dread Wolf at your side?”
Torn Notebook in the Deep Roads, Section 2: “These statues are older than anything I saw in my days with the clan. The area's dwarven, though. What were the ancient elves doing down here? Mining? Where were the dwarves? Easier to have them mine it. Not a trading post. You don't go into a friend's home, knock over their gods, and put up your own.War? I don't remember any legends about our people fighting the dwarves. Though I remember my Keeper telling a story about how the dwarves fear the sun because of Elgar'nan's fire. A metaphor for the elves of Arlathan driving the dwarves underground?”
Torn Notebook in the Deep Roads, Section 3: “Trying to remember that old bedtime song about Mythal. My mother sang it the night before the darkspawn came for my clan. It's the last time I ever heard her voice. [...]
I am empty, filled with nothing(?),
Mythal gives you dreams.
It fills you, within you(?),
Making our leaders proud.
My little stones,
Never yours the sun.
Forever, forever.
Hahren said we had lost some of the old words. What if they have changed? Durgen'lin from durgen'len? Little dwarves, never yours the sun? What did Mythal do here?”
I believe Mythal and the other Evanuris erected temples for their worship from the bodies of the Titans, like a reinterpretation of Marduk and Tiamat, and made dwarves the Sentinels of those temples. (From the Sentinels link just provided, bold emphasis mine: ”I expected these Sentinels to fight as the Dalish do, but they are a magnitude more dangerous than their cousins. There is a magic about these elves I have felt in only one other thing: the orb Corypheus carries with him. The flavor of their power is all too similar.”)
The Primeval Thaig is less a thaig and more one of these temples to Mythal. In this post I have more pictures from the game showing the similarities of dragon sculpture, if not the same style, between the Primeval Thaig and elven temples and ruins such as Din’an Hanin and the Temple of Mythal in the Arbor Wilds.
From the Primeval Thaig wikia entry linked above: “The architecture is very different from other thaigs and dwarf constructions. This thaig is left entirely untouched by darkspawn. It possesses great statues and temples, and also things created by magic. Both of these things are very strange, since the dwarves worship no gods and are incapable of magic.” This is not the only such place. Cadash or Cad’halash is another, with much less blatant elven god worship and imagery, but no less important because it was a place elves fled to after the destruction of the remnants of Arlathan by Tevinter and where the Lights were hidden away. (”Their sorrow awoke the Stone, and her children sheltered them.”) It was an established location where elves thought they would be able to shelter with the dwarves and not just a random place to flee to.
Another site “left entirely untouched” by darkspawn is the Bastion of the Pure in The Descent DLC. Shaper Valta exclaims, “I see no evidence of darkspawn here!” at 42:11. The Bastion of the Pure is very heavily defended by Sha-Brytol, particularly the battle just prior to the final campsite and the Wellspring. Unknown whether the Bastion is also part of the interior of a Titan or not, but it is incredibly close to what *is* part of its interior. There are several things to speculate from this: a quality of the lyrium keeps the darkspawn away, or the Sha-Brytol do, or in this specific instance perhaps the darkspawn kept away due to hearing the call of an Archdemon instead (there is an empty Archdemon cell underneath Heidrun Thaig which one passes along the way to the Bastion) -- Valta says the Titan wouldn’t call to the darkspawn anyway, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t hear her” (27:23). I established via Cole’s POV in “Asunder” that the song of the Titan and the song of the Old Gods are different things anyway. perhaps all of these are factors, only more information from future DA releases could tell us for sure.
So how is the Bastion of the Pure connected to my theory regarding the temples? Part of it is in an observation left as a note in the location’s entry in the wikia: “A statue which bears the likeness of Mythal and an object which looks like an eluvian lie broken in the caverns. It is unknown if this is intentional or the objects were simply recycled from the base game.”
The presence of an altar and demons in the thaig/Deep Roads ruins above the Bastion likely antedates any “elven temple” connection, but the possibility of that connection is still there, particularly when considering also the strange presence of the Gates of Segrummar, which I’ve discussed in this post. There may be a connection to situating sleeping Old Gods near Titans -- if Titans are the “pillars of the Earth” and one plans to plunder said pillars, wouldn’t it make sense to either replace or shore up said pillars to keep the world stable? Either that, or the Old Gods/Archdemons were, as @wyrdsistersofthedas theorized in their post I linked earlier, guardians or pets or ‘champions’ leashed to the Evanuris, set where they were to keep an eye on the sleeping Titans. Possibly all of the above. But I will say that the Old God prisons remind me very strongly of the quest Caged in Stone in DAO, which gives you this codex entry. (Excerpt: “The beast is foreign, but the need is familiar. Home and hearth suffer beneath strength and strangeness. These new kin of this Fereldan are better as friends than strangers, so we resist on their behalf, and work with their users to bind with the Stone.”) Additionally, the Old Gods calling out in their sleep is echoed in Corypheus being bound in his prison in the Vimmarks, also calling out to tainted creatures (particularly the Grey Wardens) in his own sleep and being completely consciously unaware of this fact when you newly free him in the Legacy DLC, but has certainly found out and mastered by DAI.
There is an extremely important insistence on purity in relation to the Sha-Brytol and the Titan. It comes up when Shaper Valta deciphers a set of runes in the last cave before the Wellspring, at 43:36: “’Only the pure may pass. All others will be punished.’ Assuming the Sha-Brytol are the pure...” “We’re the ‘others’ who aren’t allowed to pass.” And again at 44:06: “I wonder what makes the warriors ‘pure’?” (Varric: “You spend long enough this far down, reason might not be your strong suit.”) “They do wear sealed armor -- to protect them from ‘impurities’?” Whether this is general dogma or specific praxis in relation to such things as darkspawn is unclear and could be both. There are real-world examples where dogmas (religious rules) establish themselves due to necessary practices. And at 47:16, we get this: “That phrase is ‘the path of purity.’ And there’s a reference to...’Titan’s blood’? It says the Sha-Brytol come here to...drink it.” (DIALOGUE WHEEL CHOICE: The blood keeps them alive.) “I see only one substance here found in veins...” “Lyrium. The Titan’s blood is lyrium.”
Important to note that the Sha-Brytol predate the fall of the Dwarven empire and they drink lyrium to sustain themselves. Shaper Valta also sends her observations back to the Inquisition in some mysterious codex entries.
Sha-Brytol entry, notable excerpts:
[...]I am more powerful than they will ever be. They fear me. They love me. They understand I am a part of the Titan they defend, but they don't realize it doesn't need their protection. It never has. Whoever these dwarves once were, whatever motives drove them to remain here, now they are only lost.
[...] The tower offers no answers. It is quiet and spare, reminding me of descriptions of the topsiders' temples to their gods. Are the towers temples? Fortresses? Both, perhaps. [...]
Titans entry, notable excerpt:
[...]Its blood now flows through me, and its song fills the gaps in our history. I close my eyes and see glimpses of the world that was, before everything changed and the dwarven race broke in two. Something caused the Titans to fall, and the fate of my people fell with them. The Titan wants me to know. No, more than that. It wants me to understand. There is a loneliness to its song.
I believe the Sha-Brytol did originally exist to guard and defend the Titan, but with the coming of the temples to Mythal and/or the Evanuris, their role shifted instead to worship and defend the temples, believing defending the sleeping Titan was akin to giving proper obeisance to the “god” that installed him/herself within. The Titan itself could always summon a Guardian to defend itself and its heart from most attackers, likely including darkspawn, although we know from gameplay experience alone that this was likely insufficient to defend from the Evanuris.
(Picture is not mine, but borrowed from the wikia, originally uploaded by user KeladinStorm.)
The other part of the temple connection leads us back to the Primeval Thaig itself and to the title of this post, the Profane.
The codex entry on the Primeval Thaig, notable excerpt:
[...]”He spoke of great statues and temples--temples! He spoke of things that could have only been made of magic and of impossible ruins untouched by darkspawn. He described creatures the likes of which we've never seen.
None of it's possible, of course. I've conferred with the Shaper and he says the Memories date back to the founding of the first thaig--what could have come before that? Yes, we're unable to explore these depths the scavenger spoke of because of the darkspawn, but surely the Memories would speak of such places if they existed.” [...]
The wikia notes in the Primeval Thaig location entry: “The thaig is totally empty of dwarves, but is not uninhabited: it is filled with semi-mythical rock wraiths, who call themselves the profane.” This we definitely witness when playing as Hawke in Act I of DA2, but I’m calling attention to this because it is one of those details one absorbs and throws aside during gameplay because it’s not as important at the moment. :)
Several other important “trivia” that the page notes (some of which I have pictures of and noted in a post of mine linked earlier):
The Claws of Dumat found in the Fade during Here Lies the Abyss are identical to the larger statues found in the Primeval Thaig.
The smaller winged statues in the Primeval Thaig are similar to those found in the Lost Outpost beneath Crestwood.
Both types of statues adorn Heidrun Thaig as well.
The rock wraiths themselves, and especially the ancient rock wraith, have an incredibly similar form as The Guardian encountered at The Wellspring.
But what is particularly important about the Profane and links to my theory is this information in the wikia, bold emphasis mine:
The lyrium that nourishes a rock wraith gives it a connection to the Fade, and makes it susceptible to demonic possession. Rage demons often inhabit the weaker rock wraiths, but more powerful demons yearn to possess any ancient rock wraith they can find. The rock wraiths rarely put up much of a struggle. Their desire for power quickly outstrips any caution they might have.[2]
Those that speak of them tend to call them rock wraiths, though they seem to refer to themselves as the profane. This may be because they feel that they were abandoned, although it is unclear by whom. A poem found by a Helmi scrawled on the walls of Revann Thaig in the Exalted Age implies that when trapped or abandoned aeons ago, the profane "feasted upon the gods". The word profane literally means "outside the fane [temple]", i.e., contemptuous of a god or religion.
The coming of the Veil and the imprisonment of the Evanuris could also have led to the abandonment of such temples. When considering the destruction we see of Vir Dirthara in Trespasser, it’s not hard to see how badly such temples left in the Deep Roads not previously abandoned and sealed away due to fear of a waking, enraged and heartless Titan (possibly corrupted due to its rage and inflicting Blight) would fare in the aftermath of the Veil’s coming. Temple guardians (whether you wish to call them dwarven Sentinels or Sha-Brytol) left to wander, cursing the gods that abandoned them, forever sealed away to nurse their hatred and feed on lyrium as the rest of their bodies withered away and died, rejected and unable to return to the Stone.
In that light, the red lyrium idol likely comes from those who discovered too late that their gods had abandoned them, and created a symbol of all that they worshipped in their hatred and despair.
Similarly, we have the Gangue shade we encounter in DAO in the Dead Trenches of Bownammar! Its codex entry mentions purity and impurity as well.
The Stone has a will that surrounds and directs; she guides even when we are willfully blind to her influence. But she is not pure. The Stone bears a corruption as old as balance. For the dwarves to prosper, the gangue--the waste and unstable rock-- must be cut away. But like the Stone, the gangue also has an influence. Each of us must face this, must carve the worst of ourselves away, but the Legion of the Dead bears a unique responsibility. Only the fully adorned of the Legion can face the gangue, can cut into darkness that afflicts the raw Stone. She encircles us, and we must protect her, here where darkness meets light.
Similar spirits can be found in relation to Kal-Repartha, the thaig founded on the surface the Inquisitor finds out about in the Hissing Wastes, in the Four Pillars Tomb. There is a note/codex entry to be found about the puzzle one must complete to open its doors (relevant excerpt):
[...]- Demons bound into the rock! How did the ancient dwarves manage it without mages? (Binding runes? Subtle properties of stonework? Investigate!)
- "Gangue" carved into walls. Could be translated from Old Dwarven as "Stone waste" or "Impure spirit-of-the-stone." Dwarven superstition, saw demons as "impure" spirits of rock?[...]
Note that bringing Cole here prompts a bit of dialogue from him if demons are accidentally summoned: "They were Dwarves. They think they still are. They sound like dust tastes."
The question there is: do the gangue shades happen when there is a weak-willed rock wraith and the rest of its body crumbles away? Or can they literally be “impure” and “rejected by the Stone,” unable to return and filled with anger about this after their deaths, attracting or becoming demons? Regardless, between this and knowing that the Shaperate deliberately alters the Memories for their own pleasure, it seems likely that the Casteless may not be as “impure” as their society believes them to be if that purity is judged upon arbitrary and perhaps even dead dogmas no longer grounded in praxis.
A final note I’d like to share before I finally close out this now absurdly long post: I came to have a kind of epiphany during the work on this post regarding Andruil.
Her codex entry has this to say:
[...] She began stalking The Forgotten Ones, wicked things that thrive in the abyss. Yet even a god should not linger there, and each time she entered the Void, Andruil suffered longer and longer periods of madness after returning.
[...] But Mythal's magic sapped Andruil's strength, and stole her knowledge of how to find the Void. After this, the great hunter could never make her way back to the abyss, and peace returned.[...]
I stated earlier how Titans seem to help lyrium bridge the gap between the Fade and the physical world by manifesting in their bodies. This helps make them a kind of doorway between these realms, which makes sense considering the uses their hearts were put to. But when you also consider the nature and “location’ of the Void as well, you begin to understand that Andruil may have used and/or abused her orb, or temple/Titan, to find and gain entrance to the Void and have her followers create the fabled weaponry also recounted in this codex.
Lyrium, coming from the Fade which is the wellspring of thought, emotion, memories, magic, perhaps the creation of Thedas’s world itself, we know can also strip away memory and emotion in the rite of Tranquility the Chantry “discovered” when attempting to create and empower their Seekers. Considering we do not yet know the full scope of Andruil’s abilities, and it is implied that all the Evanuris were mages or at least had natural ability to perform magic due a Veil-less existence, it seems safe to say that she could be treated as a mage...
...and Mythal performed perhaps a precursor of the Rite of Tranquility upon Andruil so that she would lose the memory of how to find the Void again.
