#kirkwall

Dragon Age 2: The Fall of House Tethras

Kirkwall was founded a couple hundred years before the first blight. The placement of it is odd, and there was no real advantage to it that a mage based civilisation like Tevinter would require. Unless there was a need that we didn’t know, or that all that was needed was a place a bit out of the way, where things might go unnoticed.

So point one here is that Kirkwall is fucked up. Like deeply fucked up. The veil is in fucking tatters. It’s prone to haunting and possessions, and mages in the gallows have generally worse outcomes because the veil is so damaged. Like we joke about Kirkwall being fucked up, but there’s straight up something deeply deeply wrong with the veil in that place, and a ritual to break into the fade sure would do that.

Second point is the design of Kirkwall itself. It was clearly designed to handle large amounts of blood magic. It has drainage systems specifically for the blood of sacrificed slaves, and the streets are built in the shapes of glyphs. It was very clearly built FOR something, something specific. There’s also an elaborate system of tunnels underneath, in which mages conducted research. Secret research, that they had to keep hidden.

There were also a lot of slaves that went through Kirkwall, but a large amount that went missing from any record. Multiple records were forged to try and hide the discrepancy. Sacrificing slaves for blood magic was pretty normal in those days, so the only reason to hide it would be that you were doing rituals that you didn’t want discovered. The amount of slaves estimated to be sacrificed is in the thousands per year. The power that would generate is unimaginable and there would be very few needs for that much power.

Now, the canticle of silence tells the series of events leading to the first blight from the Tevinter perspective.

The first person to start work on the ritual was the priest of Dumat (corypheus). However after he’d been working on it for a time his first acolyte (which, side note, I think was an executor and this is the extent of the whispering the veilguard scene was getting at) suggested getting the worshipers of Urthemiel (led by urthemiels priest, the architect, because worshipers of Urthemiel were referred to as the architects and the builders) involved. The reason to get them involved was so that they, the builders, could “build [them] a road to the golden city”.

The ritual is said to require slaves beyond counting, and someone disagrees with it and goes to minrathous to tell the archon of it, but the ritual is already completed by the time he reaches it.

So, the canticle of silence describes the ritual as taking place somewhere quite a distance from minrathous. It tells us it took a number of sacrifices so unimaginably large that even some Tevinter magisters were weirded out by it, and it implies that the architect and the builders who worshiped Urthemiel built something specific to allow it to happen.

And then we’ve got a city where the veil is extremely thin which indicates actions taking place there that damage the veils integrity, which is some distance from minrathous with no obvious advantage to its placement that would indicate why a city should be built there, where magisters did secret research, thousands of slaves disappeared from records, and which appears to have been custom built for an extremely powerful ritual requiring powerful glyphs and runes and large quantities of blood.