#darktown

Eleena and Anders quickly bonded over their magic and goals. When she needed stability, she often went down in Darktown to assist him in his clinic. It brought back good memories of her time in her hometown's clinic, back in Lothering. Something from home. It also felt nice to be useful, to help. To be understood, as well. Anders and Eleena often talked about their past. They became very close friends in just a few weeks.

The gallows and any representation of it includes the constant repetition of white men [they are usually human when you can see their ears] screaming.

From the codex of the Gallows, I think we only obtain as an important piece of information that it was designed by magisters to break the spirit of the newcomers.

Colossus statues hang from the cliffs where the city was built; they are the first thing that can be seen from the sea.

Via Codex we are informed that Kirkwall (back then named Emerius)  was Tevinter’s largest quarry 1500 years ago.  Once the construction phase ended, Emerius shifted to become a slave trade city.

This iconic representation of Kirkwall is used along all series. The loadscreen shows us this image again with some extra details: two human slaves (we can see their ears) tortured or crying, circles of chain around them to emphasise their slave condition, and inside the inner circle that seems like a pool, more chains, and an effect of stirring blood from where the symbol of Kirkwall emerges. If we  take in mind what we learnt in the [Post of Kirkwall history], this image seems to represent the information we found in the codex The Enigma of Kirkwall: the blood of slaves have been feeding oceans of blood bellow the city. The symbol of Kirkwall has a posibility of represent a rising dragon, so the meaning that these sacrifices were done to bring back an old god may suggest low-key that here is where magisters attempted to reach the Golden City.

The gallows heraldry is similar to Kirkwall’s with some more extra geometrical aditions and a crown.

In the main courtyard of the Gallows, we see many statues representing, again, tortured slaves. Enormous figures of pointy armour (Tevinter-based armour), tower over them, almost as golems.

All slaves are depicted as humans [they have human ears].

Now, what brings my attention strongly here, is this series of statues, with the Tevinter jailor-golem and a slave that seems to follow a progression. The first one reaches his hand to the air, while grabbing his throat, the second and third grab their throat desperately. The last two grab their head or crawls asking for help. The concept art of this statue displays a long chain along all those slaves’s neck which it did not make it into the game. So far, it could be a mere statue that represents slavery and all the mental states in which a slave find themselves.

Until I've read Tevinter Nights [***], I did not realised that this progression can be understood as a slave “drinking down” something that hurts his throat and then, makes him mad. Of course this is just a more twisted interpretation. The most obvious one [Occam’s razor], is the progression of the slave’s mind: the weight of the slavery around his neck in the first ones, then the despair grows with the weight of the shackle, and finally ends begging for help to the air.

The Gallows, Darktown and Lowtown have a lot of art and graffiti of these slaves everywhere: the screaming human men in a row, the crying, hanged slaves, the screaming slaves, the terryfing slaves. One can assume they are the mass of slaves being traded, or sacrificed later. But in Lowtown/Darktown there are a unique variation of these figures that got my attention:

it's a human, but unlike the other representations, he is not screaming nor grabbing his ears, and his head is red and pointy. Why? Their position is also more proper of someone scared to death. He is gritting his teeth [illness or fear]. The whole simple figure gives the idea of terror. This graffiti is not repeated all over the city, just some bits in the most hidden parts of Darktown and many, many times in the Hanged Man. The other graffiti that gives some context to this one can be found in the Hanged Man:

Again, they are the usual figure of the slave, terrified, sitting against am oversimplified structure that represents the Gallows (the loadscreen of the gallows shows that structure too). I think it’s important to highlight that Lowtown was carved by slaves, and inhabited by them during the time of Emerius. Darktown was even lower: it was the home of the diseased, the insane and the dead [discarded bodies pilled up here]. In Darktown you could also find those who were hidding, trying to escape captivity. And it’s here where the images of red-headed slaves can be found. [Check details in the Codex of Lowtown and Darktown]

And what's more impressive, in the loadscreen we find a progression of that situation: the slaves turned into red-lyrium creatures, looking more like the deformed red templars in DAI than anything else we saw in DA2 [I think DA2 gives this spoiler in a loadscreen because it’s impossible to guess it until the end of the game, when you see Meredith’s fate: you can see the stone-like structure in which a living body can turn into]. This was so surprising to me. This detail is what made me suspect that maybe part of the secrets of Kirkwall are related to red lyrium [in addition to all those which are evident in the codex The Enigma of Kirkwall]. Through the codex The Enigma of Kirkwall, we know that mages have been researching underground things that they wanted to hide. Could that have included red lyrium experiments? [Read Kirkwall History for more details]

These images can be found 2 times in Darktown, and many, many, MANY times in the Hanged Man. Sadly, the Hanged Man has no codex, so we have no idea what it was used for during Emerius, we can only assume that it coudl have been a place where ill slaves gathered, as it happened with Darktown.

A small tour of where to find these images in Darktown:

and in the Hanged Man: We find these images in the very moment we enter the tavern, right in front of our noses. The main room has 3 of these paintings.

We find it too in Varric’s room:

And inside the rooms of the Hanged man,a lot more:

In less impactful details, I collected some decoration bits:

In several parts of Lowtown we see a painting of the Gallows. As we can see, it's always iconic the lines in between the building, as if it were a separation.

We also have a loadscreen repeating the Gallow’s structure in different styles.

In the summaries where Varric speaks to Cassandra, we find the Gallows represented again and again as two big metal/stone structures with a small separation in between.

Here, by the end of the game, we see this separation of the walls but with a bridge in between and below it a river of blood. Which is more or less the design of the place where we fight Orsino: there is a platform, connected to the entrance of the gallow though a bridge. The Harvester drops down into those canals [that river] in several phases.I think via these symbols we are told that these canals were filled with blood [which also is consistent with the codex The Enigma of Kirkwall]. This “river of blood” also separates the picture, in a more poetic and modern way, into two sides: on the left the Templar, on the right, something different to the symbol of the Ferelden Chantry: the Tevinter Chantry. Which is something that always got my attention about Orsino: he wears Tevinter/Imperial symbols, and he is depicted, mostly, with the Tevinter chantry symbols despite being an elf from the Free Marches.

[***] The book Tevinter Nights, and specially the short story about Lucanis Dellamorte, emphasises that some Tevinter Magisters are experimenting with slaves by forcing them to drink red lyrium. Even though this happens in a modern time, there is always a potential chance that these were ancient rituals, and the knowledge of the red lyrium is older than the time in which Bartrand found it.