#chantry

The Chant of Light

My contribution to @dragonageannual 2025 ✨

I was lucky to get assigned none other than the holy prophet Andraste herself 😊

Anders respects the Chantry

Kinloch Hold - Dragon Age: Origins

Sending a son to be a templar brings the most social mobility, they're still allowed to have a family, there is so much more freedom. To send a daughter to the templars is an act of cruelty. She has infinitely less social mobility, regarded as being ill fitted, it is not an act done of care if the daughter did not actively choose to be a templar.

Regardless of gender, sending a child to the templars is one guaranteeing a slow and painful death. But to send a willing child or a son is an act of sacrifice, faith, and love.

But to send an unwilling daughter... How do you describe that as anything other than cruel.

The VERY FIRST

This is the very first thing we learn about the entire setting of the game. It's the foundational piece for the Chantry's concept of sin. And as we learned in one of the random Veilguard videos, The Chantry's interpretation is completely fucking wrong.

The Blight not only predates the first Archdemon, it predates the creation of the Veil and the sundering of magic into The Fade. It dates back to late period Elvhenan.

So where did the Canticle of Threnodies originate? Hint: NOT THE CHANTRY.

Slave uprisings? Oral tradition? Hmm, which people relied near-exclusively on oral tradition for centuries? Who did Tevinter primarily enslave? Who has a history of slave uprisings that predates Tevinter itself? Elves. What happened to the Elves of Arlathan after it fell? Enslaved in the founding of modern day Tevinter.

Ancient Tevinter Slaves (hint: Elves) have an ancient oral dirge about a "golden city" being "blackened", and about a singular pissed off narrator telling someone that their every step blackens the city and brings doom upon the world.

A dirge primarily sung during slave uprisings. Whose big thing was a massive slave uprising or uprisiings in Elvhenan and Arlathan?

I posit that Canticle of Threnodies 8:13 is the Chantry's translation/appropriation of Solas telling off the Evanuris once and for all, and was part of his final rebuke to them before trapping them in the Golden/Black City (Arlathan) and sealing the city off and creating the Fade.

The warning survived into Elven oral tradition as they were then enslaved by the humans in the founding of Tevinter. When the Magisters then breached the Black City and found the blight waiting for them (as Corypheus confirms, although I wonder where the Evanuris were hiding), it was retconned to apply to the Magisters when the original sin...was the Evanuris.