#dalore

I can’t make much sense from a lore perspective. We know this place is not dwarven Deep Roads merely. It’s the Elven deep roads, something we already saw in the DLC of DAO. We know there is a bunch of lore that, so far it was told to us in small fragments along the previous books and games, they are the Shartan’s people, escaping from the “slavery” of the magisters (according to a Chantry point of view) or Fen’harel guiding them to a freedom underground (a vision that could be more closer to a “radical” Dalish one) We all know that the religious tale of humans and dalish share a lot of disturbing coincidences. So, in this part we have a fragment of something we were expecting to be “dwarven helping elves to escape their slavers”.  Now... the description looks different to that context:

This part was not only exclusively elven, but lacked of Darkspwan. In The Calling, we saw that the only places in the Deep Roads with these characteristics are the small lakes or rivers of pure “blue water” (that after DAI we understood as Titan blood) Is this room imbued in Titan’s blood? is related to titans? We know that before the Tevinter magisters happened, Elves were already in war against Titans. 

This is so impressive. Not because it pictures the elven king/queens or the elven gods as tyrants (we already know that thanks to Felassan and the book The Masked Empire)... it’s because there is reinforcement of the Blight into their people.

This may support one of two ideas I always kept in mind:

Elvhenan crafted the Blight to fight against the titans

, to corrupt them; they are the original “black magisters” in Andraste’s tale. However, this concept is immediately rebutal by my own brain telling me “but hey, the blue water is darkspawn filth immune”. So... there is something I'm missing there. Because there is an impossible clear logic here:

Lyrium =titan blood  (DAI)

Titan blood = rejects darkspawns and keeps the Blight at bay (The Calling, DAI)

Red Lyrium=Normal lyrium that was contaminated with the Blight. (DAI)

So, points 2 should prevent 3 from happening... but maybe magic is involved. Maybe Elvhenan found a way to force the Blight into the titan blood and finally corrupt it in order to win the war they had against them. Maybe it’s a process that takes too many centuries, which would make sense with the Red Ancient Thaigs found in DA2: the red lyrium seems to come from almost forgotten Thaigs. Thags that doesn’t seem to be very dwarven. Maybe “Elven Thaigs”. We can go feral from here.

But resuming the book... we also found hallas with many horns and being rounded, almost insectile, plus darkspawn-animals that seem to be a combination of many, the aravel more like prison-ships, elves being subject of torture/slavery... all these concepts brought to me memories from the elven paintings we found in DAI, and in the FADE! (I also always thought that the Qunari was a race made by the Elvhenan, an experiment with dragon blood - hence qunari look so draconic- and some other shit that made them a worthy army against the Titans. This bit of lore foind in this book (the knowledge of combine different creatures into a new one) may support a little bit this hypothesis)