AURELIOS COMPANION QUEST: MY MOTHER? WHY, MOTHER?
After the Winter Palace, ‘Nanny’ ( Aurelios head of staff ) will not return with Aurelio to Skyhold. Aurelio will also begin to act more bizarrely than usual, and is defensive to questioning. The Inquisitor soon after receives a letter from a ‘concerned friend’ who says some cryptic things about Lio being ‘’not all he seems’’, begs them to meet at a disclosed location in the Frostbacks. If this quest is ignored, Aurelio will ultimately die in the end battle with Corypheus.. soooo .. not ideal. Let’s continue !!
Inquis meets up with mystery party and BOOM its Nanny, who reveals her true name to be Safiya, and prefers to be called that by those she doesn’t consider family. Safiya reveals in very broken tradespeak that Aurelio has a ‘sickness’ to which she knows the cure. She details that she tried to reveal this cure to Aurelio, but he rejected it and cast her away, considering it a betrayal. If pressed: a cure to what? Safiya will respond that ‘they took his heart away, we will give it back to him.’
It’s natural to expect this to be some quest to retrieve Aurelios actual heart, but it isn’t. Safiya, Aurelios head of guard Nileena, and a few others close to him have been searching extensively for a way to get him to relive parts of his childhood through the fade. Lio is notorious for not wanting to do that, and rarely even seriously talks about it --- because, he doesn’t remember much of it. As a result of trauma, his developing brain blinked out big patches of his life before the age of around ten. He fabricated, to fill in the gaps. His father also gaslighted him a fucking BUNCH and would also fabricate things his family members / mother especially had said or done to him. Aurelios servants, then slaves, remember everything as it truly happened.
The Divine has spent his life aloof about death because everything was so black and white to him. Bad people deserve death, murdering people who do bad things is nothing to be guilty about, because they were bad. Aurelio convinced himself that his family were nothing but cruel, shallow people just like his father -- but they weren’t. Some of them were as young as he was. None of them, bar his father, were anywhere near ‘evil.’ They were in the same cage as he was, in many ways, he just never saw it that way and was ACTUALLY manipulated not to see it that way.
Safiya will insist the Inquis can get through to Aurelio, because Aurelio loves them ( she says this regardless of whether they are just close friends / romanced ) like no one he’s ever loved before, and they make him more of a person. She said she and the others have tried to help him see that in order to be his best, and begin to grow and achieve some closure about what happened to him, he has to face himself. They want him to be truly free. They want him to see that though his father taught him to be a mindless killer who suffers no consequence or guilt, he ISN’T that. They want him to be free of hate. Hate his father, hate him and wish he burns, hate Tevinter and what it did to him --- but not the innocents, not the ones caught in the crosshairs. It’s that hate that makes him nasty. Sadistic. But he never listens, or maybe he doesn’t know how to hear it from them. Maybe he’ll hear it from the Inquisitor.
Of course, he does. It takes convincing, but he goes along with it. Adamant that it’s pointless and it’ll lead nowhere and it’s a waste of time because he knows what happened blah blah. A small ritual is performed, and the Inquisitor, Aurelio and the party travel to the Fade. Thus begins a series of occurrences:
Aurelio and the party will begin to experience various parts of Aurelios young life. Siblings beaten for asking to see him. The Archon, Radonis, chastising / threatening his father for what he had done to ‘’the boy’’, his sister teaching him how to navigate his room, how she’d cried when they were found and he was dragged away. His mother lying in bed with him after the ritual had been performed, stroking her hands over his wounds, crying and just saying ‘’sorry, i’m so sorry’’ over and over again. Seeing how her relationship with his father, how she was treated, was horrific, just like his was. Obviously, at this point, Lio starts to almost --- dissolve into tears himself. Not that he comments on them. He can barely speak but he asks, firmly, to leave. He says he doesn’t want to see anymore.
When they return to the physical, Safiya, AKA Nanny, is waiting for them with some more of Aurelios servants. Aurelio at first will claim trickery, and try to weasel out of everything by claiming this was all some grand fabrication, but Safiya and the Inquisitor can talk him down. They assure him that he couldn’t have known, he isn’t damned, he is just human: like everyone, and that is their point --- that humanity has weight and consequence but humanity is all that stands between him and being just another monstrous dictator.
Aurelio becomes increasingly upset, understandably, as the weight of everything really does settle on him. With the Inquisition, he has begun to show more .. remorse, and empathy lately as it is, but this is just a whole new level of breakthrough for him. Safiya says they all loved him, and they all here love him now, and even though it hurts and it makes him feel sick and heavy and hollow all at once, wasn’t it better than hate? Safiya tells him that she loves him more than anything, and hates herself for being too frightened of him to fully tell him the truth. If the dialogue is successfully executed, and he is fully romanced / friendship maxxed at this point: quietly, he asks: my mother, she loved me? And Safiya says yes. Aurelio will break down in tears and is embraced first by the Inquisitor, Safiya, then slowly more of the people in the room --- people who have known him all his life, and love him anyway.
Aurelio will then be FULLY PROPER maxxed out friendship / fully in love at this point. It is also after this that he is considered more ‘human’, not unlike Coles companion quest, and begins to truly break apart and understand empathy and the gravity of taking life. He still does it. Just not as .. thoughtlessly, mindlessly. He is also focused entirely on redeeming Tevinter, and almost abandons the idea of destroying it, considering it more of a ‘’last resort’’ than an exciting second option.
