Anyone who’s played the games knows Dragon Age has something weird going on with music and sound. Breadcrumbs have been spread through all three games and the supplemental materials as well, but I never put them together quite like this.
I have a theory about it and I want to see if other people think I’m off base here.
Lyrium and Spirits
We know from Justice in Awakening that lyrium “sings” to spirits.
The song is beautiful but saddens him. He says the mortals don’t dream of lyrium the way he experiences it outside of the Fade, likely meaning (despite what I’ve heard elsewhere) that there is no lyrium in the Fade and he has never seen/heard/experienced it before.
But it reminds him of the Fade.
The Fade is where magic comes from. Full stop. That is where mages pull magic from to manipulate the world around them.
But lyrium, when refined, can both enhance already present magical prowess (restoring and intensifying the magic of mages), and create magical effects through enchantments by way of individuals cut off from the Fade (dwarves and tranquil).
We know now that the Veil keeping the Fade and the waking world separate was an artificial construction put up by Solas at the same time he imprisoned the Evanuris.
He now seeks to bring it down and it will supposedly end the world in the process. No one is sure why, especially if the world once existed without it.
The Blood of Titans
In The Descent, we learn about titans for the first time, and their existence answers as many questions as it raises.
We already knew that lyrium was alive from Bianca who figured out that red lyrium is blighted.
We learn that lyrium is titan blood. With it, dwarves communicate with them (unknowingly) through the Shaperate and their lyrium engravings of history.
But the Titans have another method of connecting with dwarves. They can infect dwarves with pure lyrium by making them drink it (drink, not eat, despite lyrium being a solid “metal” most of the time—the drinking is important for its connotations in other places, like the Joining), turning them into Sha-Brytol, defenders of the Titans that seem to have less capacity for sentience than regular dwarves.
They act, despite their weapons and armor, less like dwarves, and more like something else that lives in the Deep Roads…
Side note—The Sha-Brytol, the way they act, seems much more in line with the Old Elven Writing codex entry than regular (or modern) dwarves: “Their workers scurry, witless, soulless.” What else is soulless in the Deep Roads?
Valta was shot with a blast from the lyrium Guardian and retained her mind. With her connection to the titan, the Sha-Brytol “love and fear” her.
The Archdemon
Blights begin when the hordes of darkspawn in the Deep Roads finally uncover an Old God and corrupt it with the blight, turning them mad in the process and making them rise from the depths to conquer the surface world (and not the remaining dwarven kingdoms for some reason).
Supposedly.
I say that because I still don’t know what the “Old Gods” are. Likely, they are the Evanuris that Solas imprisoned, but as far as I know, that’s still not confirmed. I wouldn’t harp on this, but that weird conversation between Solas and Cassandra about the Archdemons being pets to something more powerful is still ringing in my ears since the first time I heard it.
Why bring it up if they aren’t?
And what’s strong enough to control a god?
The only thing we do know is that the Archdemons (whatever they may be), call to the darkspawn, even before they’re corrupted.
Like they are searching for something powerful to lead them.
This affects the Grey Wardens as well, a phenomenon called the calling that affects them anywhere from five to thirty years after their Joining.
The Darkspawn
Despite both the Wardens and darkspawn being infected with the blight, what makes a Warden a Warden and not a ghoul is a mix of Archdemon blood and lyrium.
When the Architect gave regular darkspawn Warden blood, they gained sentience and could no longer hear the call of the Archdemon.
If I understand this right, that would mean it is the blight that causes the calling, and Archdemon blood severs it (since there is plenty of lyrium and mortal blood in the Deep Roads that the darkspawn could potentially ingest).
But the Archdemon itself is the draw of the calling. Or maybe the product of it since we don’t know if the archdemons really are corrupted by the darkspawn that reach them, or if they are corrupted in their prisons before contact.
In The Calling (the novel), the other darkspawn give the Architect and a ghoulified Bregan a distrustful berth but also listen to the former when given orders.
Kind of like the Sha-Brytol do with Valta.
By the time of Awakening, the Architect has settled for severing the darkspawn from the call, but in The Calling, the Architect wants to spread the blight to all of Thedas to bring “peace” to the world.
The fifth Blight was brought about when the Architect tried to use its sentience ritual on Urthemiel, possibly blighting it in the process, but definitely waking it up.
Red Lyrium
There’s also something weird going on with red lyrium.
Why don’t the fully corrupted lengths of the Deep Roads have infected red lyrium instead of the blue variety? If the blight corrupts everything living, and it covers the Deep Roads, then why isn’t the living lyrium in the corrupted Deep Roads red?
Why isn’t it infected?
Why is it only “originated” in the Primeival Thaig? Does the titan the lyrium belongs to have to be infected for the lyrium it produces to also be?
That doesn’t explain why regular lyrium can’t be corrupted into red unless the corrupted titan (and by association, red lyrium) is the source of all blight. Like a different species of titan.
The Chant
As someone raised Catholic, the chantry and all its bullshit is my least favorite part of Dragon Age. I pay attention to its lore about as much as I paid attention to its real-world equivalent as a kid forced to go to church. I, personally, find it super boring and tend to glaze over when it’s mentioned, so if any of this is wrong or I left out some key point, let me know.
That said, this last piece is a little more out there than the rest, but hear me out.
The Chant of Light is based around the “teachings” of Andraste, who sang to draw the attention of the Maker. It is also stated that she had dreams of something she called “the Maker” and later interpreted it as a creator god.
This all happened not long after the catastrophic first Blight.
The Chant is a song that, according to the chantry, if sung from all corners of Thedas, will make the Maker return.
So they spread it across Thedas, led by the teachings of Andraste.
Kind of like how a Blight spreads across the world, led by an Archdemon.
From Andraste’s dreams, I figure that the Maker is likely some kind of spirit, but I don’t know if that’s even relevant to this idea that I’m formulating. Unless it’s not actually a spirit. Unless it’s something more.
And not at all like the Maker of the chantry.
Questions
That… spreading aspect of the Chant and blight, the song they’re both compelled by…
They’re different, sure, almost as different as blue lyrium and red lyrium.
Something about it keeps tugging at me.
If the Chant of Light is part of the lyrium song and “needs” to spread from all four corners of Thedas, and the call of the darkspawn is the same (or similar, like a red lyrium song) and the Archdemon compels them to rise from the Deep Roads and spread (like Andraste inspired the people of Thedas to rise up and fight), what exactly will happen if they do?
The Chant says the Maker will return, but what about the darkspawn? What happens if an Archdemon succeeds and a Blight covers the world? What happens then? Is something like the Maker going to “come back” or be released?
And then there’s the lyrium’s origin as titan blood. If all of the above is, in fact, right and related, then the logical conclusion would be the “song” releases the titans. But release them from what? The ground?
Theories
Under/inside a titan is open air very much like a sky (puts the dwarves’ fear of falling up into perspective, doesn’t it?).
This is, again, a stretch, but the Fade is also considered to be something like a sky.
What do spirits say the blood of titans reminds them of?
The Fade.
I’ve seen the Black City theorized to be Arlathen, which I tend to agree with.
Arlathen was “sunk” into the ground. It’s now in the Fade. But it supposedly went down.
I know how this sounds, but I think the Fade is physically below Thedas, under/inside the titans.
By spreading the song throughout the surface world (because remember, the darkspawn don’t spread through the Deep Roads during a Blight), that it would fuse the Fade and Thedas again.
Or maybe something else.
You know how most cultures/religions in Thedas have the heaven/hell dichotomy of two separate place? It’s sometimes called the Beyond and the Abyss, but usually it’s called the Fade and the Void.
Well, we’ve seen the Fade plenty, but what about the Void?
We haven’t seen that yet, unless we connect the Void to the blight, which I’ve seen other theories do (like Andruil and her Void armor, forgetting herself, etc. being a sign of blight infection).
But then, where is the Void?
Well, if the Fade is in/under the blue lyrium titans, and the blight is connected to the Void, then the Void would be in/under the red titan.
Conclusion
So, again, taking this all with a grain of salt the size of a mountain, and assuming my connections are correct, what does that ultimately mean?
- If the blue titans’ song is spread throughout Thedas (presumabaly via the Chant of Light), then the Fade and the waking world will fuse back together.
- If the red titan’s song is spread throughout Thedas (via the Blights, but now also the quickly spreading red lyrium), then the Void will fuse with the waking world instead.
As a last bit of “evidence” (if you can call it that), Valta says that the titans are sleeping and one woke up because of the Breach. The Old Gods are also sleeping, and when they are woken, the song spreads.
Where does everyone except for dwarves go when they sleep? The Fade.
What was the Breach that “woke” the titan? A tear into the Fade.
What if Valta was wrong? What if the Breach didn’t wake the titan? What if the titan waking was the part of the Breach?
Titans, the producers of magic in both the Fade and lyrium, are asleep.
The titans sleep, the Fade is separate. The titans wake and the Fade, the land of sleep and dreams and magic (as Sandal infamously prophesized) returns.
I think the song, the calling, the Chant, whatever you want to call it, is literally going to wake up the titans from their Fade-slumber and that is what will bring “down” (or push back?) the Veil.
It is literally the veil of sleep keeping magic from the world.
We saw a little bit of what the world would be like if the Fade was fused with Thedas when we went into the future in Redcliffe. It was not good. We have no idea what the Void (hell, in this context) could be like.
If the Fade is Thedas’ version of heaven, and it looked that bad, then what could hell on earth possibly look like?
All I can say for sure is that I’m ready to find out.