happy thedas weekend!! if it inspires you, maybe Solona Amell and major injury from the heavy content prompts list?
How's "practically in a coma from constantly pushing herself beyond her breaking point fighting two simultaneous Blights and then battling a god for control of his own source of power (also the blight) for a few straight weeks and then suddenly losing the thing her body has been using to sustain itself for over half a decade (again, also the blight)" for a major injury? :)
As a Warden, Solona is personally offended by Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain's double Blight. As a mage... by the time Veilguard starts, her specialty is Blight Magic. Most people who see her mistake her for a darkspawn emissary fighting other darkspawn. She has a rough time during Veilguard.
@thedasweekend
As soon as the Wardens deemed it safe to handle the dead blight without risk of infection, Tarquin sent out Shadow Dragons to begin the long and painful process of removing it from the city. They started by clearing out access to the hardest-hit areas — whole streets and neighborhoods so choked by blight that it had been weeks since even the bloodied light of Elgar’nan’s sun had reached them.
Their idea was to search for survivors first, then move the bodies for identification to the makeshift morgue Pavus — Archon Pavus — had set up in the Argent Spire, but so far, all Marsaar had found were corpses so mutilated and blight-riddled that even their races were impossible to determine.
From the way the woman was slumped against the sewer wall — clad all in rags, head lolling to the side, hood casting shadows on her face that even Marsaar’s flickering mage-light couldn’t penetrate — the woman closer resembled a beggar passed out from overindulgence than the victim of a darkspawn attack.
In fact, Marsaar rather suspected it was the darkspawn who were victims of her. The shriveled husks of their corpses were strewn across the ground around her. Dozens of them, showing clear signs of lethal magic — limbs mangled by force spells, body parts flung far and wide by shattered ice, ashy residue of viscera splattered across the walls by entropic explosions. A staff lay discarded by the woman's feet, its crystal head glowing weakly from within the crushed skull of a hurlock.
But what most disturbed Marsaar were the darkspawn with the deep parallel gouges clawed into them or the chunks ripped out of their now-calcified flesh by teeth — wounds she’d only ever seen on people killed by the darkspawn. To find those same injuries on darkspawn themselves sent a shudder down her spine.
What could possibly cause darkspawn to turn on themselves like that? She recalled one of the Wardens mentioning that, when a typical Blight ended, the darkspawn horde fractured among smaller warlords that squabbled for dominance without an archdemon to unite them. But this wasn’t a typical Blight, they said, and all the darkspawn in the city died when the rifts snapped shut.
One week into the siege, as Marsaar and the surviving Shadow Dragons had huddled in the Divine’s basement listening to Lusacan roar above them, the Viper had felt something shift in the blight. Like a key change in a once-familiar tune, he’d described it. Something new had entered the city, against all odds, and it had wrested control of the very blight itself from Elgar’nan. Just a little, and just in small areas at a time. But the Viper swore that, between battling Solas’ attacks on his archdemon and this nameless force’s attacks on his blighted thralls, it drew the worst of Elgar’nan’s destructive focus off the people of Minrathous who were just fighting to survive.
A power like that, using the blight as a weapon against itself, would certainly explain several dozen darkspawn mauling each other to death in this sewer…
Gripped by a perverse fascination to see what kind of person might possess that power, Marsaar crept closer to the body at the epicenter of all this carnage. She moved cautiously, flinching at the faint crunching sound her foot made when she brushed against a darkspawn’s severed head, as if scared the slightest noise would spook the corpse into unleashing the blight on her.
As Marsaar grew near, sightless eyes beneath the woman’s hood caught the otherworldly reflection of her mage-light. She held her breath, her heart hammering with anticipation as she reached out with the tip of her staff to push the hood back.
The woman looked… like a woman. Dangerously thin, with too-pale skin drawn taught over too-gaunt cheeks, but otherwise, she looked like every other blighted person cured in the aftermath of Elgar’nan’s defeat. Faint, residual veins still snaked beneath her skin in the sunken bags of her eyes, and the oily black ash of dried blight still clung to her otherwise light hair, and —
Realization froze Marsaar in her tracks.
The woman looked like every other blighted person cured in the aftermath. The dead weren’t cured. With no life left in them to purge it, the blight inside their bodies calcified with all the rest.
This body's chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly.
Marsaar scrambled backwards. Her heel caught on the crushed hurlock, and she fell, screaming, to the ground.
“Marisa!” she cried out for her fellow Shadow Dragon. “Get your arse over here. Now! And bring the stretcher.”
Pushing herself up onto her elbows, she stared into the glazed, unseeing eyes in front of her and tried to swallow her terror past the lump in her throat. With a nervous laugh, she added softly, “Tarquin said he wanted survivors, didn't he?”
By the way, this is Marsaar:
She's my Mercar, a former saarebas who was rescued from the Qun as a teenager, and yes she did choose her name because it sounds like her adoptive dad's surname... which is now her surname. She's a little confused, but she's got the spirit.
