I know this won’t be a popular take, but my favorite place in Dragon Age Inquisition is the Fallow Mire. I get the hate, I do (especially the never-ending undead in the water), but as the first “small” (lol) area in Inquisition, it tells its story very well.
I will also admit that I’m a sucker for creepy swamps and apocalypse settings, and the Mire has both. Honestly, all it needed was some mountains towering over it and I would have been golden.
That said, I know this is the last place in the game most people want to revisit, but give it one more chance (sans wading through endless undead), and look a little closer.
Set-Up
Though it technically costs more influence to open up than the Storm Coast, the Mire is one of the first places you can get to after the Hinterlands, and the contrast is stark.
After the bright morning sun glistening through the lush foliage, and an armed conflict threatening to burn the land and its people to the ground, we come to both the polar opposite and possible result.
I think, more than anything, the Fallow Mire is a warning about the future of the Hinterlands.
Like In Hushed Whispers, the Mire gives us a look at what would happen if the Inquisitor wasn’t around to fix things.
Warlords (like the templars and mages) conquering territory through conflict. Undead (re: demons) running amok. And the little people caught in the middle? Dead and gone.
Remember how I said the Mire was an apocalypse setting? It’s the end of the Hinterlands—the opposite and theoretical future if events continue on their path of destruction.
Time
It’s also, literally, night and day.
Where the Hinterlands were sunny (I always felt like it was morning with the angle of the rays through the trees), the Mire takes place in the middle of the night.
There’s not so much as a hint of light in the sky from anywhere other than that massive, luminous moon looking down on us like some eldritch eye.
It’s haunting but also feels incredibly unsettling. Like you’re being watched.
From the bright world of the Hinterlands, the Mire drops you into the night with all the darkness and fear that brings.
Weather
And it’s only compounded by the weather.
Haven is covered in snow, and the Hinterlands feels like a cool, crisp morning. If you took the cheaper route and visited the Storm Coast first, you might have felt a little more familiar with the sheeting rain, but it’s nothing compared to the Mire.
If the darkness of night wasn’t enough, it’s also positively storming.
The rain is unending and sluices off of everything caught in the downpour. There’s so much of it that the world feels claustrophobic. It’s also a little foggy or misty which certainly doesn’t help.
You can hardly forget your poor character is drenched, but when the realization hits again, all you want to do is take cover in the dilapidated cabins or ominous caves.
You feel closed in by the rain, like it’s hard to breathe through it, compounding that feeling of claustrophobia. It’s instinct to run inside from the rain, and a storm like that feels dangerous.
Especially the lightning.
Like a gunshot hitting the ground (usually right in front of you), bolts pierce the dark and quiet at unexpected intervals, blinding light that blackens their mark—and occasionally leaves wisps behind.
I don’t remember any connection between lightning—or weather in general—to spirits, demons, or the Fade, but to have them called from the ether like that just compounds the fact that you are not safe and the Veil is very thin here.
Environment
And why wouldn’t it be? It’s a swamp.
In Dragon Age, they’re practically synonymous with magic and a thin Veil.
The Kocari Wilds (especially after Ostagar), the Tellari swamp where Yavana lived, Blackmarsh and its swiss cheese of a Veil…
What I’m saying is that the Mire keeps up a tradition at this point. I’m a little upset we didn’t find any witches though. Well, real ones at least. I don’t count former Circle mages getting spicy.
Though some trees still retain their foliage, most are sparse or dead-looking. A few verdant copses have alder, a tree known for the “eyes” on its white bark. I think it’s worth mentioning that alders are also one of the first trees to grow in an ecological succession.
It might be a re-used asset, or it could mean that the Mire underwent a disaster that severely impacted the plant life, and a relatively recent one. Like maybe the Blight which would lend to the poisoned land aesthetic.
Beyond the rocky roads that trace through the Mire, grass and scrub take a backseat to the endless mushrooms.
Grey and clustered as fungus is wont to do, the mushrooms stand out because they make us think of poison, death, and decay. Things the Mire has in spades.
In canon, mushrooms like Deathroot are also some of the only things that can grow in blighted lands.
It’s not as in-your-face as the other facets, but the swamp tells you, before you learn anything else, that the Mire is desolate.
Terrain
More than half of the map is covered in shallow water, with traversable land acting more like islands or peninsulas surrounded with fetid murk.
The land there is mostly flat, grassy areas that you can imagine as tiny pastures in better days, but now the livestock is replaced with demons and bogfishers.
Here and there immense rock formations jut from from the ground over the rest of the land. Mountains or similar border the Mire to the north.
Open water spreads to the south, but it doesn’t quite feel like a lake. More like a flooded plain that you could walk all the way through. With the windmill looking over it, you imagine it might have been vast fields or pastures at one point.
A road makes a winding cut through land and water, sometimes using bridges and ever ladders to avoid the latter. The path makes its way over the few hills in the Mire, and some of them have an interesting decoration…
Architecture
The Beacons, given the dogs on the statues, are clearly Fereldan in make, with the Veilfire and runes put there afterward. Considering their central placing along the path from Fisher’s End to Hargrave Keep, they are likely little more than path markers.
Likewise, the piled stone fenceways that marked the roads, typical for Fereldan, are in disrepair, many toppled down and hardly more than dotting the path—which is, unfortunately, also typical for Fereldan. The Blight certainly wouldn’t have helped them economically, and tiny settlements in the middle of nowhere like Fisher’s End aren’t exactly a top priority.
Which explains, in part, the dilapidated houses you come across.
There’s a question as to how long the Mire has been depopulated due to conflicting in-game sources, but I air on the side of “not long” thanks to the Avvar and references of the townspeople seeing them.
If we take that as our answer, that means people were living in those little, broken shacks. That’s a troubling thought for many reasons, but mostly because we can find the undead inside them. Either the missing walls couldn’t keep them out, or the occupants died of the plague and their bodies were possessed where they lay.
The only “livable” houses are in Fisher’s End, right at the start of the Mire. They’re modest, with a couple of little treasures like you would expect from a small village, a necklace to a loved one and a vintage bottle of alcohol. There’s not much else in the way of luxuries which makes sense for a fishing village, but unlike the other buildings we come across, these are relatively kept up.
Moving through the empty homes, you come across the first pyre, the dead still burning next to the only broken structure. Since the only non-hostile occupant of the Mire is Sky-Watcher, an Avvar that would offer the dead to the sky, the Inquisition troops are likely the ones burning the villagers who died in their homes.
No one else was left to do so.
Hargrave Keep was unquestionably abandoned at least forty years ago, and considering the current climate of the Mire, I’m surprised there’s any wood that hasn’t rotted away. The “throne room” in particular looks exceptionally deteriorated, the arched ceiling caving in on itself.
It’s a little surprising that the Avvar chose the Keep to claim rather than their stolen stone work—considering they would be getting rained on regardless of local…
And there’s so much of their statues and archways that the original Hargrave stole from her skirmishes with the Avvar.
In certain areas around the Mire are those screaming, twisted statues that you saw in the Hinterlands in certain places, and from the codex next to one, we learn they’re Avvar in origin. They’re hunched, silently screaming, painfully emaciated, and show signs of strange anatomy, clearly human but with wavey appendages flowing down from the sideways head. Lovecraftian, but for some reason they remind me of the abomination models, particularly the sloth demon from the Circle Tower in Origins.
There are also circular stone arch constructions at the Den and Granite Point that, from the latter’s codex entry, are likely also Avvar in origin. Granite Point mixes in some Fereldan dog statues around a dead tree and the Den has urns like those in elven ruins, but the arches themselves remind me of Stonehenge. Considering the Avvar’s relationship with the Lady of the Skies, and Stonehenge was a astronomical marker, I could see the arches being a place of worship for her, or even a site of sky burials when they still existed among the Avvar.
Flora
Ignoring the ubiquitous elfroot, the Mire also has tons of blood lotus, and to a lesser extent, dawn lotus. No spindelweed though, despite the vast expanses of shallow water.
Blood lotus, like its more striking cousin, black lotus, is hallucinogenic in lore. In games, it serves as part of Antivan Fire, Confusion Grenade, Jar of Bees, Pitch Grenade, and Tears of the Dead (which you can find the recipe for in the Mire). Lots of grenades, and everything is either mind/perspective altering, or damaging.
Dawn Lotus can only be found in the Mire and is used in much more in tonics and potions rather than poisons and grenades, except for Antivan Fire. They include Electrical Resistance Tonic, Healing Mist, Healing Potion, and Mighty Offense Tonic.
To me, the inclusion of dawn lotus (instead of its thematically and literally darker cousin, black lotus) in the Mire is an odd choice. While it could just be that each lotus type simply stands out better in their respective biomes; black lotus stands out better along the pebbled grey beaches in the Storm Coast than dawn lotus would, and vice versa.
I think they mesh narratively.
The dawn lotus is the only speck of “light” to be found in the Mire. Like their real-world equivalents, they shrug off the literal murk around them, but also the metaphorical doom and gloom. A ray of sunshine, a hope for better, and the implication of a cure for the plague, all held within those white petals.
Fauna
Lore-wise, we know there should be “stags” or some kind of ungulate in the Mire, but we never see a single one, not even your own given that mounts are disabled in the region.
There is only one bear in the entire map, found at Granite Point (not the Den where it is alluded to, for some reason). It’s certainly not the ursine army of the the southwestern Hinterlands, but because of its sole inclusion, and its location near the Avvar statues, it feels like the game is associating the bear with the Avvar rather than the Mire itself. I think that makes sense given the later addition of Storvaker and hold-beasts.
A much more common creature (and the only other natural inhabitants) are the bogfishers. These things creeped me out the first time I saw them. They’re weird, mammalian, reptilian (???)… things, bristling with teeth and a pig-like snarl. When attacked, their preponderance for grouping and ability to fully guard themselves and charge can make quick work of an under-leveled (or over-trialed) party.
But they’re also not aggressive unless you attack them first.
I grew a fondness for the gross little guys as I realized they are the only thing in the swamps that doesn’t want you dead. If you leave them alone, they make their gurgling calls and shuffle around you. They feel like bigger, uglier nugs to me.
And that personality bait and switch, kind of like the dawn lotus, makes you feel like the Mire isn’t as bad as you originally thought—or at least, could one day be better than it is.
Magic
It wouldn’t be Dragon Age without some fucked up magic.
I hesitated on even making a category for magic because aside from the undead that I could have folded into the wildlife, I didn’t remember much.
And then I started thinking about it. And thinking about it.
There’s actually quite a lot of magic in the Mire, so I’ll start with the obvious.
Anytime the Veil is thin and there are bodies around, you tend to end up with spirits and demons possessing them. While they were a little more detailed in Origins (anyone remember the vampiric undead that were never brought up again?), I think the lack of background on them in Inquisition makes them a little more unsettling.
The region’s codex entry states the waters “preserve” anything that dies in them.
Whenever you stray into the vast swaths of shallow water in the Mire, a handful of undead rise from the depths. Any disturbance brings them to the surface, which makes me wonder how the villagers could make a living on their namesake, and the rifts certainly didn’t help.
The way they constantly crop up in the water gives them a dangerous feel despite a lack of real challenge to their encounters. It gives the Mire a feel of unease and constant vigilance, while also dissuading you from adventuring further in. I think it does a good job of making you feel the way your character (and the villagers) likely did through a video game mechanic.
The wisps produce those same feelings the way they appear out of nowhere from lightning strikes as if you can never let your guard down or be surprised by something malignant.
Supposedly the beacons draw out the demons in the Mire when lit, but that never seemed to work for me. The Veilfire is supposed to draw them out so you can destroy them all at once, put in place by Widris, as well as the messages left in the runes.
From her journals and codes, we know Widris was using the local flora for a potion that would let her see past the Fade. Wherever the hell that might be.
“The concoctions I can make with the plants here, in safe amounts, will open my mind to vistas past the Fade.”
I can argue this two ways. One; she was using the only unique plant in the Mire—the dawn lotus, a mainly healing and warding type flower—to gain access to a realm beyond dreams, and beyond what we know of Thedas.
Two; she was tricked by demons into using the blood lotus to concoct a poison that would send her beyond the Fade—to her death. As her runes reveal the Tears of the Dead recipe, I assume that’s what the game is trying to tell us, but the former is more interesting, in my opinion.
She also had an elvhen artifact in her camp, and since she was actively summoning demons from across the Veil, it adds weight to another theory I’ve seen that Solas was having you activate them to weaken the Veil, not strengthen it.
I don’t know if this is technically magic or not, but if you read a couple of the non-codex notes floating around, a couple of the villagers were trying to cure the plague with elfroot and spindleweed, but at least two died of it before they could. Worth noting that despite one of the notes saying it grows in the dry areas of the Mire, it normally grows where it’s wet and doesn’t show up at all in the region.
History
The only real history we know of the Mire is that Bann Hargrave asked for it as part of her victories against the Avvar three hundred or so years ago. She strong-armed the king into it, and he had little choice but to grant her the region. Famine broke out and her reasoning for asking for such a godforsaken place became clear. When crops rotted in the fields, she and her people could fish, hunt, and gather (and presumably be left alone) in the abundant swamps.
Hargrave’s line later died out in the Fereldan rebellion against the Orlesian occupation over forty years before the start of Inquisition.
Recent Times
A plague started up not long before the Herald got there and decimated the inhabitants despite notes suggesting they knew how to cure it.
The Avvar are spotted by at least two separate villagers who then convinced those still breathing to clear out, leaving the area abandoned.
The Avvar moved into the keep (I hesitate to say occupy because though we don’t know for certain, given that the first Hargrave was fighting Avvar, presumably over the same land, I assume the Mire was originally Avvar territory). The Avvar take over the ruins as a base, and from the notes the villagers wrote, it seems like they had been known to raid or likewise even before they capture Inquisition soldiers to force a fight with the Herald.
Though it’s verbalized as more of a religious conflict, given what I stated above about the Mire likely being their land, it feels more like the Avvar are coming back to the Mire for more than a deity dick measure.
Worth noting that the Chasind, another tribal society (I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase—non-Fereldan humans living in Fereldan since before it was called that) also live in the southern swamps. All I’m saying is that the Mire belonged to someone before Hargrave claimed it.
Loot
Cassandra has an amulet of power in the Mire next to a codex on Nevarran royalty. I always thought that was a weird place for it—in the Mire, not next to the book—until I realized it’s the undead the game is making a connection with. Cassandra has family in the Mortalitasi, Chantry-approved necromancers.
The fact that you can find the base cleansing rune here also makes sense, since you need corpse hearts to make it (and there are so many corpses walking around), but also in the sense that the villagers were trying to find a cure for a disease before they were run off. Maybe the rune was one of their prototypes? (I’m ignoring that in canon only Tranquil and dwarves can make or apply runes. It was only the schematic, not the rune itself.)
The Gift of the Mountain Father that you win from the Hand of Korth mentions caves and not leaving the mountains, that the Avvar would be provided for if they stayed there. That puts their war(?) against Fereldan in the Steel Age in a different light.
We hardly know anything about that particular conflict, but the Avvar leaving the mountains where their dogma tells them to stay seems odd if there’s no reason behind it. If I had to take a guess, the Fereldans could have been harassing them in their holds, prompting the Avvar to fight back. Just a theory.
Tears of the Dead is aptly named and while looking at its wiki page, I think I made a connection, though I admit I might be grasping here.
It is a damage-over-time poison, and all you need is blood lotus to make it (something the Mire has plenty of). We know Widris gained knowledge of it through demons to supposedly gain access to a world beyond the Fade. We know that despite having the recipe and materials (and the fact that it’s a poison), Widris is still alive by the time the Inquisition gets there—the only non-Avvar humanoid in the Mire.
So, did she not try her own recipe?
Or did she, like any good (mad) scientist, test it out first? Like maybe on some conveniently nearby villagers? A slow, deteriorating process much like a plague, despite the people of Fisher’s End living amongst the likely disease-riddled undead for centuries without issue and knowing how to cure plagues…
Just a thought.
Conclusion
That’s about all I have on the Fallow Mire, and considering how relatively small a space it is compared to others in Inquisition, I think I pulled quite a bit out of it.
I hope all this instills a little love for my favorite region, or at least calms some of the rampant hatred I’ve seen others profess.
It really is a wonderfully creepy place, and I think it reminds me of that claustrophobic unease that I loved in Origins.
Also, I just really like swamps.