Titans
But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness, like a heartbeat drives you mad, in the stillness of remembering what you had, and what you lost.
Titans are gargantuan beings that live in the ground and are able to shape the stone that surrounds them. This one is going to be a bit difficult, as we know virtually nothing about them, but I’ll pass on what we do know, just add a universal “we think” to all this information. Shaper Valta introduced us to the concept of the titans as we tried to discover the cause of the earthquakes threatening Orzammar. Though there is little record of them, she was able to find two documents that pointed to their existence. They had been around for at least thousands of years, based on the ages of said documents, but seemed to have been largely inactive in most of that time. Valta put forth the theory that her colleagues, both current and past, had attempted to eradicate all information about these beings, for whatever reason. As we delved deeper and deeper under the surface, Valta was guided by a form of call or song, similar to that of the Old Gods, but less evil. It turned out to be emanating from a titan, and we finally encountered one at the end of our journey. Now, if you’re anything like me, the name “titans” brought up visions of large humanoids that live in caverns beneath the surface. Giants, but even bigger, something like that. Well, we were wrong. We ended up in a massive cavern, lush with plants and animals, enough to sustain a civilization of dwarves, called the Sha-Brytol, which guarded it. In this cavern we did find, and fight, a large golem-like rock creature, but that wasn’t a titan, either. What we came to understand was that the titan didn’t live in this cavern, the cavern lived in the titan. It wasn’t a flesh and blood creature as we understand them, it was a being of the stone that could move through and change the rock around it at will. More eerily, we also solved the mystery of red lyrium and why a mineral could be corrupted by the darkspawn taint. Lyrium is actually the blood of the titans, giving a morbid, literal twist to calling sources of the substance “veins.” After connecting with the titan, Valta stayed behind, inside of it, to commune with it further, but the path to the cavern was cut off shortly after we left. We know so little about them, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the titans had, and may have in the future, an unfathomable influence on the state and actual shape of Thedas.
