Not long after dealing with the Jaws of Hakkon in Frostback Basin, the Inquisition received a request for aid from Orzammar, the last great dwarven city, or thaig, as they call them. Like the elves, the dwarves used to have an empire, only theirs was underground. The problem with that is, the darkspawn live down there, too. Ever since the monsters emerged during the First Blight, the dwarves have continued to lose ground to the seemingly endless numbers of the monsters, sealing the tunnels that connected their cities, the Deep Roads, behind them as outposts and thaigs fell one after the other. Until recently, when Kal-Sharok made contact with the outside world for the first time in nearly 1,000 years, Orzammar was thought to be the only city left. And it had just been hit with a series of powerful earthquakes, tearing open a fissure to the surface near the Storm Coast. Still raining there, if you were wondering. The quake had destroyed several lyrium mines and reopened numerous darkspawn-infested tunnels. With the expert darkspawn-slaying Grey Wardens in the area mostly out of action, and because most of those who were left were part of our forces, the Inquisition was Orzammar’s best hope for help. I wasn’t all that delighted to be going underground for an extended period of time, if I’m being totally honest, but rectifying this situation was worth any amount of personal discomfort. After we built a mining lift to get us below the surface, we met our contact, a shaper named Valta. Shapers are dwarven historians and record-keepers, basically. Val got us up to speed on the situation before another quake hit and she saved me from falling rubble. And, yes, I found Valta to be adorable, as I apparently do with all lady dwarves.
Fortunately for my skull, Valta is able to move remarkably fast for someone in a suit of heavy armor.
Worryingly, it didn’t take long for us to encounter our first darkspawn. It was a really big one, too, an ogre. Even with Val’s help, it was tough to bring down. And shortly after, we encountered many more. Fortunately, these ones were smaller and we had more dwarven help, this time in the form of the Legion of the Dead. The Legion is a group of warriors dedicated to fighting the darkspawn in the Deep Roads, before they can get to Orzammar. They have funerals when they join the Legion, and never return to their homes, fighting until the end. Hence the morbid name. We helped this group, led by a solid lieutenant named Renn, push back the darkspawn long enough to seal the tunnel they’d been pouring through. That gave us a safe place to establish camp before another quake hit, this one accompanied by an odd sound (so I was told, apparently only dwarves could hear it), which prompted Val to expound on her theory of the cause of the quakes. She had found an ancient text that referred to something called titans, enormous beings capable of shaping stone by “singing” to it. There was no mention of titans anywhere else, they were completely unheard of before Val had found that document, but I believed her instantly. In all my time inquisiting, I had never had a theory posited to me that had turned out to be untrue, no matter how strange. I also knew, at this point, that I would end up at least encountering, if not fighting, a titan by the end of this trip.
I can acknowledge that the Deep Roads are spectacularly beautiful and still hate being in them, right?
Naturally, we had to descend further into the Deep Roads to unravel the mystery of these unnatural earthquakes and hopefully put a stop to them. So, via elevator, that’s just what we did, with Val and Renn in tow. We cleared a path through hordes of darkspawn and giant spiders, and encountered strange doors that required gears to open. I’m not sure they were magic gears, exactly, but they were definitely weird and scattered about the landscape, so I officially count them as RaMOs. Seeing as how I am the inventor of the acronym and foremost expert on Random Magical Objects, you can take that designation as definitive. Eventually, we found ourselves in the ruins of another thaig called Heidrun. There was a darkspawn nest there, which, despite the fact that virtually everything was made of stone or metal, was on fire. We battled our way through waves of almost every type of darkspawn imaginable as we cleared the nest out, which let us establish another foothold in the Deep Roads and take a well-earned rest. While we did so, engineers and construction crews came in behind us and fixed several routes we had been forced to bypass, leading to more exploring and interesting discoveries. After this bit of backtracking, there was only one way to go, further down into the unexplored darkness.
I’m essentially an expert on fire and this is utterly baffling to me.
