Just a BioWare Fan

As he listened to his heart a step sounded on the loose scree behind him. He whirled, staff blazing to life as he snapped the blade to ready, and found an old woman standing there, grinning mischievously at him. The rows of studs on her rich armored leathers gleamed in the moonlight and feathers showed black at her shoulders and hips against the rising light. She bore no weapons and stood without fear, waiting for his reaction.

None of this made more than a passing impression on Abelas. It was her hair that arrested his attention. She bore the jutting white horns in which he’d first seen Mythal, though nothing else about her looked the same. Instead of the proud ears echoed by the elaborate style she had a shemlen’s rounded-off nubs. She lacked the glorious decoration with which all the elvhen gods had shown the power and devotion of their followers.

He dismissed all of this as unimportant. None had ever worn their hair thus.

As usual, I was reading the BioWare boards and an idea sprang into my head.  You see, it’s never sat well with me, this image of high dragons huddled in caves deep underground.  Dragons fly.  They don’t tunnel.

(Sidebar: Why are they called Archdemons and not Archdarkspawns or Archspawns?  [narrows eyes at writers]  It sounds cooler, sure, but do demons really come into it?)

At any rate, the thought of dragons snoozing so tightly bound and deeply buried that the Darkspawn take centuries to dig it up bothers me.  How did they get there and who put them to sleep?  (Fen’Harel?  Only time will tell, if BioWare ever does.)

What if what the Darkspawn find underground is not literally a sleeping dragon, it’s a magically sealed vessel containing the soul of an Old God?  They let it out and

I’ve written in a few places about how deeply The Head and the Heart’s Lost in My Mind moves me. Now that I’ve played Dragon Age: Inquisition it has a new layer of meaning for me. I picture Solas, humming this song as he’s painting the mural of your Inquisitor’s story. I imagine the lyrics running through his mind when he’s talking about or to the Dalish.

Most strongly, I want to see him singing this with Abelas, the perfectly pitched, civilized howl of loss and yearning and hope for moving forward. Solas sings the first two verses and Abelas the third then they burst the hearts of shemlen everywhere with the emotion of the chorus, sung together.

Excepting a minor anachronism the words fit beautifully for a pair of ancient elves embarking on a painful journey out of the past to which they’ve clung for so long.

We know, now, that Morrigan will play an important role in Dragon Age: Inquisition. From past experience, we can guess that Flemeth will also be involved somewhere. BioWare has set the two against one another, after all.

I’ve seen some vehement defenses of Morrigan, some folks who insist that she’s sacrificing her happiness for the greater good in fighting Flemeth (and having that pesky Old God Baby). Rather than derail a thread or three there I thought I’d post my thoughts here.

The first of them is, “Poppycock!” While some people see our acerbic hedge witch as altruistic and self-sacrificing I see her as cold-hearted and calculating. She has an agenda, all right, but you have to consider who she opposes as well as what she says.

Aveline and the Dragon

Varric has told this story in so many ways with so many embellishments that I find even my own memory wavering. Since I alone was involved in every step and helped make every decision along the way I feel obliged to set the record straight. It may be that no one will read this but at least I can remind myself that, Champion though I may have become, my experience in Kirkwall was not all glory and easy power. Yet there were moments when things came together perfectly or when magic blocked my path in ways so unbelievable that even Varric cannot convince people of the truth.

Once upon a time I lived in a little village in Ferelden. My father was an apostate mage and my mother a noblewoman from far away who had defied her wealthy family and run away to marry him. They’d put half of Thedas between themselves and her parents, settling in Lothering and raising three healthy, powerful children. My sister Bethany took after my father, both in dark-haired good looks and in talent, while her twin, Carver, was the ugly duckling just coming into adulthood. Perhaps in a few more years he’d have grown into that chin but he never got the chance.

My father was killed before we even got clear of our small farmhold near Lothering when the darkspawn horde, the one that should have been turned aside at Ostagar had that bastard Loghain not betrayed poor King Cailan, overran the countryside. It was a brown and struggling place even before the taint poisoned the land. We farmers worked hard and many of us were trained in weapon skills, trap making, and—secretly—in magic because the predators and vermin fought back and often were bigger than we were. But we had been proud of our whitewashed cottages and even had our own Chantry, humble though it had been.