On the other side of the exceedingly out-of-place eluvian, we found a different stretch of the Crossroads than the one Morrigan had introduced me to earlier in my adventures. We took a quick detour to clear a dilapidated library of demons before following the Qunari’s blood trail through a different eluvian. This one took us to some elven ruins overlooking a beautiful valley filled with more elven ruins. And more dead Qunari. And angry spirit guardians that made more dead Qunari. Some of the dead Qunari had clearly been killed by a powerful mage, but we could see a group of them were still alive. We negotiated the path of eluvians that warped us to all sides of the valley until we used a statue to raise a bridge to the central building. There, we found more Qunari and spirit guardians, and neither group was in the mood for talking. So, we did what we do best and cleared the place out. There, we discovered four things. Well, there were a bunch of minor things, as well, but four important things. The first was that the Qunari were there because of the eluvian leading to Halamshiral. They were planning to use the magic mirror to infiltrate the Winter Palace for what I’m sure were not very nice reasons. The second thing was that they had been troubled by a mage that they dubbed an “agent of Fen’Harel,” who killed a bunch of them, set the spirits on the rest, and disappeared. Third, was that my glowy hand gained the ability to light a room. Well, more than the little bits of one that it already could, because it was glowy, this made a big area glowy, not just my hand and the surrounding few feet. Oh, and it made us invulnerable for a brief time. Probably should have led with that part. Or, this one, actually: since before the Exalted Council, my glowy hand had been acting up. And by “acting up,” I mean “causing me massive amounts of pain.” Far more than usual, and completely randomly, not just when I was using it to seal Fade rifts. So, fun times for me. Anyways, the fourth and final thing was of the history-shattering-revelation variety. Which was nice, it had been a while since I’d found one of those. This particular one claimed that this valley had been a haven created by Fen’Harel for freed elven slaves. The same Dread Wolf that was generally considered to be a malevolent trickster, a generality that did not vibe with this new information. Also, he was mortal while performing these uncharacteristic acts of charity. And he was freeing the slaves from the elven gods, who weren’t gods either, just very powerful, arsehole mages. So, what I’m saying is, the entire Dalish belief structure effectively obliterated in one stroke.
Who’s a good, giant, stone, glowy-eyed puppy? You are, yes you are!
As I’ve already addressed, I am generally open-minded about religious beliefs in general, and Dalish religious beliefs specifically. I always had trouble completely buying in to all of it, that the truth was exactly as it had been told. The amount of ancient knowledge that we had lost over the centuries meant that what we supposedly knew was a half-remembered patchwork to begin with. Things we’d discovered in our adventures had begun to poke even more holes in those stories and I had always taken it in stride, because it lined up with what I already thought. But having the odd hole poked in something and having it blasted into smithereens are two very different things. Of course, the elven gods actually being mortal mages was just one building’s opinion, but I’d learned to trust these kinds of things by this point in my travels. The weirdest, wildest, most blasphemous ideas that I came across were inevitably accurate. Remember the titans? The ones that only one person thought existed before we helped her find one? Well, I didn’t have much time to deal with the crisis of a faith I didn’t really have faith in, however, because the Qunari threat was real, immediate, and trying to stab me in the face. Back in Halamshiral, we briefly regrouped before heading back into the eluvian to see if we could discover more about what the Qunari were plotting. When we went back to the Crossroads, we found some of the horned men moving along a path that hadn’t been there on our previous trip. So, either the Crossroads were changing, or the Qunari were changing them. We ended up in the Deep Roads, of all places, where we found more Qunari and more hitherto undiscovered elven ruins. Which shouldn’t have been underground. We also found a talkative ex-Templar named Jerran who had joined the Qun during Hawke and Varric’s time in Kirkwall. So, when he told us that his current leader, a Qunari called the Viddasala, was as crazy as his former Knight-Commander Meredith, who had more or less instigated the Mage-Templar war with her insane paranoia and cruelty, I was concerned. Vid also wanted to start a war, it seemed, but this time it was with, well, everybody else. Us, Ferelden, Orlais, the lot. To that end, the Qunari were mining lyrium somehow and feeding it to the Sarebaas, their mages, which is something they’d never done before. The Qunari feared magic and its destructive potential, so they kept the Sarebaas on short leashes and didn’t give them the one thing that could make them even more powerful. The only hang-up I had about stopping this plan was that it had a fun name. They called it “Dragon’s Breath,” which is fantastic enough that I, admittedly, planned to steal and use it for the Inquisition in some fashion. Oh, and they thought I, and by extension, the entire Inquisition, answered to Fen’Harel. Naturally, I had to stop all of this nonsense, which meant, also naturally, that I had to kill lots of things and blow up the entire operation. Literally.
And they call it a mine. Ha!
My newly developed super-glowy hand ability came in handy in all of the dark places of the Deep Roads. Very convenient that I’d gained said skill just before we went down there. The Qunari were using gaatlok, an explosive powder, to mine the lyrium. My plan was to kill two birds with one stone and get rid of the gaatlok by using it to blow everything up. A plan which went spectacularly, if I do say so myself. The only issue was, that, as you might expect, neither the Qunari nor the cavern itself responded very well to the excessive use of explosives. So, they both tried to kill us. One by trying to murder us to death, and the other by trying to crush us with falling rocks and drown us with the torrents of water that were suddenly pouring from above. We made it out unscathed, of course. Upon returning to Halamshiral, I dealt with an incident between an Inquisition guard and one of the Palace’s servants that ended up exposing the entire Qunari plan. Barrels of gaatlok had already been smuggled in, with the express purpose of blowing up the Exalted Council. Unfortunately for them, we discovered it in time and prevented a repeat of the Temple of Sacred Ashes explosion that kicked off my entire Inquisitorial journey. After that, it was time to head back through the magic mirror and track down the architect of this devious scheme.
The brain trust, just like old times at the war table in Skyhold, only in a much fancier room, with two ridiculous outfits and one phenomenal hat.
