dragon age posting

She outstretches a great hand, as deep and as unknowable as he is great and evident. She has encompassed the world, just as he has overtaken the sky. Creatures of sensation rarely satiated. Tremulous and strangers to each other and to existence, they will their breath through lungs not yet shaped. They are concept. Signifier without signified. Imago, ready to be breach-birthed through the gaps between the Dreaming and the World.

Her mate and her, they come from the same splintered branch, off the same swaying stone tree. They gestated, entwined, as the world decided what it would be before it released them wet-mouthed and wandering onto the shores of newfangled reality. Engendered from the breath of the world, still shapeless and unknown to themselves, to each other, they existed as one.

Voices not-yet-born would call them siblings, mother and father, Vengeance and Justice.

She germinated from the spit of the ocean and he reached into that bloodied birth-foam (blood of the earth! blood of the world!) and hooked his fingers into her gaping, begging, mouth. She slid her teeth into his wrist and let him drag her from the depths, gulping ichor into a throat that wasn't flesh yet.

Now they squirm, unfound and new, beneath a sun that has no interest in seeing its children happy. They have no weight. They are form-less, wanting shape. What is there for two newfound spirits to do? They ask the earth and it refuses an answer. Its children scurry along its spine and pick at them like insects. The sun is hot and the air is stale. The greenery is vast and lush and they wish to know it all, to have it, burn it, be it.

They ask again and the insects say nothing. The earth has no answer. They wish to shape it in the way they best see fit and the earth threatens to crack them in two.

Her husband, sibling-in-song, is quick to anger. So is she. The earth stakes a claim to itself that it has no right to. It decides for them where they can and cannot go. Demands sovereignty over itself when they are here to shepherd it.

How dare it!

HOW DARE IT!

Sinking their shapeless hands into its soft and fleshy abdomen, they descend upon it storm-ridden. They have no chosen shape, and so choose for this reckoning one they both find beautiful. Wings and claws and talons. Horns like crowns, and power diaphanous to break bones with and suck them dry.

A hunted thing has not existed in this world before. They hunt the very pillars of the world.

She caves the earth's head in and he climbs in the cavern of its broken skull to anoint himself with its death. It is awake as it dies, and babbles in a language that is ugly and stupid. In the warmth of the world's womb, they dreamt to each other in much lovelier, brighter words. The earth's words are the words of things that have no place here anymore, a jagged and recursive language that held the fabric of existence fast and closed until they came, wiser and greater, and now there is no need for the pillars' harsh and broken words. The earth speaks as one, a copy of a copy. What beauty can an echo make?

In the midst of this gore, they are hungry. But they were never hungry before, and it cores them, like thunder a tree. With claws and teeth, they tear out great chunks of soil and cram them into their bloodied un-mouths. Lungfuls, gulpfuls, of rib and gut and gore, of blue-bright heaviness that satiates until they vomit.

They have bodies to vomit from.

She grips his great broad shoulder and keels over, suddenly meat. With gut comes pain, a thrill from head to toe. Her esophagus spasms and she reels from the bile, acid and bitter. She laughs. Her throat pops colour out of her in the shape of sound. He grins at her, and he has teeth to grin with. A mouth smeared with acid and half-digested land. Appalling. He grins and grins, and pulls her towards him and pushes her open. His hands are so large. Her body so unformed, uncompromised.

But a body has a heaviness. A body has phlegm. And viscousness. And wetness in its unexplored and depth-hot corners. He gathers chunks of her like he gathered the soil to eat, spreading and kneading, opening, unlatching a door in her core. Out spills light. She has no say in where his hands roam, wondrous in his conquest of earth and sea and sky, as he appends mud to her bones and smooths its ridges down to make a body. She cannot stop him from claiming the making of her, but she can do the same to him, so that they will forever be a creature of both.

She yields, to make him pliable and bendable. With his hands, terrible and bloodied, he cracks her open like a femur as he learns how to crawl back inside of her. She opens, a womb, mother of this new world. She uses the earth to fashion him further. Under her muddied hands his features gain definition. Sharp cheekbones. Full lips. She shapes his chest and makes his hands more solid and with weight, large enough to engulf her if she wishes, hardy enough to wield a weapon or a sceptre.

He is not just impression, anymore. They are not just tendrils of consciousness upon which to graft flesh. There is intent in her design of him and in her fashioning of her own self, guided by his hands that make her breasts, her throat, her nipples hard with just a gentle rub. He is large but she is capable of holding him. She tells herself she will be able to contain him, when the time comes for the world to burn so they can rebirth it.

He smears blood and phlegm across her lips with his own. They have gored a thing and have eaten it, and a great secret has now passed between them, at the coming of this new world in their image. A new world that extends beneath their clawed and smooth-skinned feet, and it has gifted them with their own unknown downfall.

All has changed. Now comes a world where things can be killed on a whim. They have chosen smallness for the sake of primacy.

He pushes her onto her back. Bone fragments, grey matter, pressed up against her shoulders and spine. Her hair, dark and long, wet with innards. They learn new ways. They were one thing, and now they are two, and seek to make each other one again. He returns to the fold of her; she turns her back to him onto all fours so she does not have to see his blue bright teeth. His wide hands that she has made lost in her hair, new sensation ripped from the roots as he yanks her head back. She slips on the dead and discovers pain when her elbow hits the ground. It doesn't matter. Magic is splitting her open, making her mighty.

He feeds her more, from behind, her back against his chest and his hands prying her jaw open, and drips the lovely blood down her chin and chest, onto her belly that wasn't there even just moments before.

It rips the world between them. Fans her ribcage into wings adorned with veins and capillaries. A thunder around and above them. She rolls her head back and glares upwards to the storm.

kind of the most straightforward example we're given of how souls work is the lich ritual, right, as well as emmrich healing drayden from the brink of death in v&v. the soul “ascends” out of the body toward the fade, and there’s presumably somewhere in the fade where dead souls go (as evidenced also by hezenkoss sourcing souls from the fade to fuel her skeleton mech) (do dwarven souls also go to the fade. i digress). but a soul can be pulled back down, either before it severs from the body (see: drayden) or after (see: liches).

the soul is a person’s consciousness and identity, right. mortals and spirits and presumably the titans have souls. the evanuris bound their souls to the old gods (high dragons) as sort of a plan b situation in case something went wrong (which it did), sort of like backing up a computer, i guess. while in the black city, they’re able to speak through the host of the other part of their soul, but only through dreams—they can’t physically speak through the archdemons, i think? but my point is that the evanuris’ consciousness is in some way split between their physical bodies (in the black city) and their archdemons (in the deep roads). the archdemons are also noted to have a higher intelligence than most dragons, which can likely be attributed to the evanuris’ souls.

grain of salt on this part. interestingly elgar’nan and ghilan’nain are able to exhibit control over their archdemons, but it seems more like controlling an attack dog than having a split consciousness—i’m not sure whether barking commands to lusacan and razikale is just for communicability to the player or if it’s actually how they control their archdemons, though, because i would assume that elgar’nan and ghilan’nain’s connections to “dragon leashed by the blight” and “dragon that literally contains part of their souls” would be different, but off the dome i think the way they command the blighted dragons is very similar to how ghilan’nain commands razikale at weisshaupt.

the whole “old god soul” thing is… never circled back to, afaik. the closest we get is morrigan in vg talking about how she inherited the part of mythal’s soul that was in flemeth when solas killed her, and it happened through a dream. i can kiiiiiind of, vaguely, make a link between that and the evanuris using the old gods to communicate with neromenian and tevinter dreamers in the fade. but it’s mythal is using morrigan as a vessel for part of her soul, which is more similar to the other evanuris’ connections to the old gods—but the difference there is that morrigan has a soul of her own, whereas afaik dragons don’t have souls? don’t quote me on that, i could be making that up.

(but great dragon blood also allows avexis to control them…? plus. gestures at maric. gestures at reavers. there’s something with dragon blood, especially great dragon blood. notably the archdemons are high dragons, not great dragons—maybe great dragons have souls…? but that’s a different tangent.)

where was i, um. souls. right. so liches. the lich ritual, as far as we know, involves killing someone, catching their soul after it severs from the body but before it reaches the fade, and returning it to the body. in this way, the lich is functionally immortal—it can’t die of natural causes, but it’s still vulnerable to attacks and damage. which indicates that souls themselves are immortal, to that degree. when a person is killed, their soul doesn’t cease to exist, it goes to the fade. the souls of the dead can still be used as fuel by hezenkoss to some degree, right, but for her big climactic sacrifice, she wants living souls. so a dead soul in the fade is weaker, because it’s not tied to a body…? i need to replay emmrich’s questline, i might be remembering this wrong.

regarding anders and justice. if gaider’s word of god is taken at face value here. the body/vessel (anders) is killed. anders’s soul ascends to the fade. but justice isn’t killed, and his soul remains in the mortal world.

but their souls are intertwined, mashed together—something that i don’t fully understand the metaphysics of in-universe, i think, and i don’t know if it’s really explained, beyond what anders says, and he’s outright wrong about justice at times lol. @fadeling’s post referencing the dungeon meshi egg analogy explains it well. the examples we have of bodies with two souls in them are of two kinds:

- possessions: wynne, connor, anders, feynriel (conditionally), lucanis. these are two full sentient beings, each with their own complete soul, sharing a single vessel.

- partial possessions: flemeth, kieran, morrigan. these are one full sentient being and one partial soul—fragments of mythal and june.

and we also have the third case, where a body sharing two souls doesn’t work, a failed partial possession:

- grey wardens, and the ultimate sacrifice.

why does this fail? as evidenced by abominations, two souls are able to exist in one vessel to some degree of success, and this isn’t even a full soul. kieran can contain the fragment of june’s soul just fine, and flemeth and morrigan can hold mythal’s; the host may not maintain full control over their body, but that’s true of all possessions. so why, when a grey warden absorbs the soul of an archdemon, are they unable to cohabit the warden’s body?

my theory here relies on the taint. unfortunately i do not have a very in-depth analysis of this because i’m not exactly sure how. but it has to do with the taint. that’s specifically how the old god’s soul is drawn into the warden, the reason the joining exists and is effective. for some reason, two tainted souls are unable to coexist, thus killing them both.

i’d say both souls go to the fade, but the verbiage destroyed is used with some frequency, which raises questions as to whether the souls do continue to the fade or whether they’re fully obliterated, erased from existence. the latter case would explain why the dead evanuris haven’t been reborn in the fade in some form despite spirits reincarnating; it also might explain why killing an archdemon allegedly kills the evanuris it’s tied to—outright destroying even part of a soul causes the soul to grow weakened, or perhaps even wither and die, maybe depending on how much of the soul is hosted in its separate vessels? with the evanuris trapped in the black city, if some manner of soul transference is possible, surely they’d put more of their soul in the archdemons, the only way they can influence the mortal world. right? is this anything?

the reason kieran is able to host june’s soul fragment is likely because of the dark ritual: we know little of it, and it is explicitly blood magic; i suspect it likely cleansed june’s soul of the taint similarly to how merrill cleansed the eluvian. the dark ritual also brings into question at what point a person develops a soul in the process of gestation. if kieran didn’t have a soul yet and his grew sort of around june’s, that could be something. if kieran inherited june’s soul and never developed his own, that could also be something. june is definitely still alive in a kieran worldstate though, and unless he moved his entire soul to kieran and let his body in the black city die (which i don’t think is likely considering the archdemons), he probably should’ve escaped with elgar’nan and ghilan’nain. but that was too complicated to be dealt with i guess lol hence flemeth taking june’s soul, solas killing flemeth, and mythal’s fragment transferring to morrigan, with any mention of june being swept under the rug in the process

souls being able to be fully destroyed would also explain why lich emmrich can die in the siege of minrathous/from that, why liches aren’t fully immortal. perhaps in the state they’re in, with the soul having been severed from its vessel and simply yoinked before it could reach the afterlife, liches are particularly vulnerable, and killing one completely destroys its soul. the lich lords remaining reclusive and secretive could be a result of physical weakness, as a dead soul being killed eradicates it completely. in the case of the ultimate sacrifice, though, the soul is decimated without even reaching the “dead” state, do not pass go, etc. etc.

regarding ending possessions, the only way to do so when either the host or spirit is unwilling is to kill one of them in the fade. i. i don’t actually know how, physically, a person manifests in the fade when they sleep, but iirc killing feynriel in the fade makes him tranquil? severing the titans from their dreams is what made them tranquil, right, so killing feynriel’s dreams would do the same to him. that much lines up. dreams are their own thing that can even manifest physically (see: the blight) and this post is already long enough, i can’t get into that.

spirits typically possess people through their dreams, and through that conduit they physically move into the body. right. but as evidenced by anders and justice, when a person who hosts a spirit dreams, the spirit takes over in the fade. so does anders not dream on his own anymore? their souls are combined; can anders not take control in the fade as justice can in the mortal world? even at redcliffe, we see a few apparitions of connor in the fade, but the desire demon is the one we confront, with no actual sign of connor’s consciousness.

something about the host’s connection to the fade is interrupted by a possession. the souls merge, but they can be separated by killing the spirit in the fade. so i wonder if by killing the mortal in the mortal world, they can be separated in a similar way…? the fade entity being the one in control in the fade vs the mortal entity being in control in the mortal world, and killing the one in control sets the other free…??? i’m just. spitballing here.

but anders and justice are so entwined that they may not be able to separate. justice has significant input in the mortal world, even when he’s not “in control” like he is during tranquility. there are little bits of anders’s dialogue that are different tonally from how he spoke in awakening that indicate justice speaking, though anders doesn’t lose consciousness. maybe it’s reached a point of their souls mixing together that both of them are in control in both realms—though again. see: justice fully taking over in night terrors, and anders saying justice is in control when he dreams. so it’s almost like… 75% justice, 25% anders.

so with anders and justice. why, and how, would justice’s soul remain in the mortal world while anders’s is sent to the fade, especially if they’re melded together? lucanis and spite’s souls are extremely separate, the polar opposite of anders and justice, a pretty clean 50/50; would lucanis being killed look any different? is justice able to stay alive because of his soul and anders’s truly becoming one? how would anders’s soul be dead, then, if he is justice?