a crow never abandons a contract

my stance is that if i have to accept for the premises of this discussion that gameplay mechanics found in the darkspawn chronicles dlc are canon, then everyone else has to accept that sebastian can do this shit from his skill tree for real

the dust town palaces are older than orzammar as a capital and existed prior to the current dwarven civilisation. the dwarven empire only really pops into the lore when it becomes relevant to the tevinter imperium and we don’t have a lot of data on, for example, how it came into being and whether there may at one point have been multiple dwarven cultures that were conquered/united/whatever you want to call it. if we accept that tyrdda bright-axe lived in about 1800 ancient when the avvar are said to have been founded, then we know a dwarven prince, hendir, was living in the frostback mountains at around that time, well before orzammar should have been home to royalty. it’s possible he was simply far from the capital, but it’s also possible he belonged to an independent kingdom or tribe that existed at that time. tyrdda’s saga does seem to describe an alliance very particularly with hendir’s people, specifying a peace with “hendir’s dwarves” rather than with dwarves as a whole. dust town may belong to a part of history that modern dwarven culture would like to sweep under the rug as much as it would the casteless themselves

the dust town palaces did belong to the dwarven empire/kingdom as we know it but at some point simply became unpalatable or unsafe to live in due to some kind of mining disaster or even blight outbreak or something. the noble caste fled and rebuilt, and only those with nowhere else to go were ever willing to live there again

but also, listen to me, your friend, who is telling you that no they didn’t, because it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

we’re told explicitly in a codex entry that the capital moved to orzammar to engage with the surface and specifically the tevinter imperium in trade and resources. okay, well, when garal was king, the tevinter imperium did not exist. it was only invented by a guy who lived alongside stonehammer. and furthermore, it was way up north! in, you know, tevinter! it was uniting for the very first time and not remotely ready to expand all the way to the frostbacks. there is no logic in which stonehammer makes this world-changing foundational alliance with tevinter and then is like let’s move the capital city way down here because we desperately need to centre our empire next to the fucking alamarri in case random avvar tribes want to buy industrial amounts of lyrium. kal-sharok was literally closer to tevinter already! this isn’t anything.

this whole problem only exists because world of thedas i guess wanted to shove all the important dwarf lore at one guy (stonehammer), and make him ally with tevinter, invent paragons, and decide the move to orzammar all in one go. despite the fact that a codex already exists saying some guy called garal did the move to orzammar to trade with the tevinter imperium. so they did a hasty world of thedas volume 2 retcon to say actually garal was involved in the move as stonehammer’s predecessor. but that clearly still doesn’t make sense because the original logic for the move still falls apart. tevinter isn’t here yet.

the “yet” is important. for the record, it does make sense for the capital to move to orzammar as part of the tevinter alliance at some point. ask around at ostagar and you’ll learn the tower of ishal has stood for so long because it’s “dwarven make”. all of that lovely tevinter architecture? the imperial highway, crossing all of the south? the fortresses? dwarven make. that’s why it’s all stood for so long and is still so visually impressive. (real life roman roads do not look like that lmao.) and presumably the lyrium that permitted the imperium to conquer the place was also being provided. if the dwarves are doing so much trade with tevinter’s legions down here then orzammar (established as home to the mining and smith castes before it was the capital, so presumably also always having had access to the best stone & metal & lyrium resources) becoming the centre of activity has some logic