#magisters

You learned the hard way not to mess with what is not yours. Some parts of the ship were out of reach for you both phisically and rule-bidding. Vilgax must’ve loved his privacy for him to be so adamant about not letting you pass certain corridors – or maybe he just didn’t want a sticky fingers where he keeps his most important weapons, docs and what nots. After some time, you and your father got used to Vilgax’s weird ways of “carring for the immune humans” as he put it. Immune… Maybe in the past you would’ve bragged about how you never caught chicken pox when your whole school was under lockdown because of it, or how you’d always heal faster than others if you scratched your knee. But an immunity to this horrible thing? This wasn’t a brag, this was about survival of the human speecies.

You became a science experiment, with each passing second understanding what animals go through with testing. Some testings were varying from invasive to hellish. Thankfully, the warlord was always theere to stop the mindless drone in hurting you further, taking you to the cockpit with him. Most times, your father was not allowed there, yet you were. It was a safe spot for you filled with a red hued light and the air around stuffed with beeps and pings of incomming rifts. Rifts? Yes, you passed countless tares in the universe that looked like they could suck you in, but they weren’t black holes. They were worse: the remnants (or the lack of remnants) after different wars and planetary destructions by the Chimeran army. Vilgax always passed through deserted or ‘friendly’ trails in the universe to not risk an attack while you were on board.

Snooping around the main frame and cockpit of The Hammer, you found some documents and testimonies from other planets that experienced similar things. Similar, not the same. And they weren’t as violent as yours. The harshest one was on a planet called Kirima-Betta. The speecies there was extinguished in the span of 2 human years and was classified as Appollion 9/10. Did you know what that was? No. Did you think It was some danger level? Yes. Did the warlord tell you Earth was experiencing a 13/10 on the Appollion scale? Also yes. Maybe what aliens were saying about humans was true, maybe humans were some terrifyingly strong but not longevive beings. Because Earth was very much still there and there were countless humans still not infected by whatever this anomaly was.

You were sitting on some improvised spot near a screen, or window – you weren’t sure what that thing was exactly but you always got scolded for sitting around alone. What if you fell through it and into the endless cold void of the space. And weren’t you going to the Moon? Why was the journey so long? The Moon was so close to the Earth that you’d actually be closer to it than any other human if you stood in Point Nemo. Maybe Vilgax didn’t know where he was going.

“You are thinking about something, small one. Speak.”

“About why… us”

The warlord sighed and leaned on the screen, and sighed deeply. You weren’t telling him the whole truth and neither did he tell you his side of the truth. Unicronus Terra – as he said Earth was known as in the Universe was taking back what humans kidnapped. But what? He never said. “If you wish to know why, you should just listen to me and help me. Your father already complied and is tinkering with a teleportation gateway in the head of The Hammer.” Your father working with Vilgax… well this was something you never thought you’ll see in this or any other lifetime. It seems that planetary viruses were what it took for your old man to go against his bleieves.

It has been some time since you were on the Hammer and people can change their aliences during difficult times to make sure their loved ones are safe. You already both lost too much – you could not blame him for trying his best keeping both of you alive. Especially after being taken in by one of the most terrifying creatures in the known universe. He destroyed entire solar systems for people doing less havoc than you did since embarking. The thought that Vilgax could easily kill you at any point after achieving his goal. But what was his goal here -

“Vilgax-”

“Ah, do not worry. It is to travell faster and to mask your scent from the Core. And stop staying on the sill of the glass screen, please!”

He sounded exasperated. Well, it was normal – it was the 9th time today that he told you to stop snooping around the cockpit. Or delete random files from his main frame… You swore it was an accident, but he still put you in confintment for 2 days for deleting a peace treaty between the Chimera sui Generis and Chimera sui Iterium – the two main races of his people that had been at war for thousand of google of years. And you just voided the whole treaty in 0.01 seconds. You were lucky he knows how to forge countless documents and official anouncements.

But even Vilgax had his limits and seeing you weren’t moving away on your own, he grabbed your waist with one hand and put you back on the ground himself. It was an oddly good feeling to have his hand around your waist, making your heart stop for a jiffy and making your mind run to an ‘what if’ scenario. You shook your head as this was not the time for some meaningless banter and needs of the soul. You were in an apocalipse. And not one like you would see in some high-budgeted movie; but the kind you’d see a film student from no where make as a project. Rough, terrifying and disgusting were too kind to describe whatever the Earth was now dealing with.

You wondered back around the ship – this time in sectors you were 100% allowed and would not allert his robotic guards, making you end up in a stasis pod for a few hours… again. You went to the medbay again, the sterile smell of medical grade alcohol and unknow medicine filled your nostrills, but was not met by repultion anymore. You grew to enjoy the small room, inspecting everything around thought unknowingly as most labels and warning stickers were written in some alien tongue you yet to learn. Even so, anyone in their right mind seeing a big red triangle with an exclamation sign plastered on it knows to keep themselves in check around said apparatus or substance.

You climbed on an examination table, much to the disdain of a drone that beeped and mumbled something incoherent. Was it its hate of flesh, of humans, or simply of someone that could potentially dissrupt its working cycle? Stay tuned to find out on Y/N’s wild Hammer Rush – only on chanel XYZ of Interplanetary External Network, I-Extra-Net.

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The smell of burnt clothes and sweat disrupted you after hours of rearanging bottles and viles in the medbay – much to the displeasure of the medibot inside the medbay. Your father walked in, his hair tussled from whatever work he was doing for the giant evil octopus man. Or squid… Narwhall! Kidding, but you catch my drift dear reader. Your father looked tired, it was clear as day he was working hard to make the inner teleportation bridge work, a payment for Vilgax’s “rescue & retrieve” mission.

“What happened?”

“Neutrons messed up again some problems with inter-chains and… borring nerdy stuff, sport. Don’t think too much about it, we’re landing to the moon in T-80. So uhhh, you might wanna stay put somewhere. I learned he’s not a soft lander.”

Perfect. The corridor to the safespot was long and running across it was a small death wish in this case. T-70, T-50, T-30. You both rushed to the cockpit and secured yourdelves to emergency seats, as the warlord laughed. “It is only a landing, not some hazardous bombing.” Surprisingly, he was right- Vilgax landed somewhat smoothly. As smoothly as an elephant can dance ballet inside a teacup. At least you were still intact: nothing broken, nothing inside you jumbled. But you had a weird feeling once the warlord turned off the gravitational field around all around the Ship.

You whipped your head to your father, who was equally as confused as you. “Not in my 20 years of working with the plumbers have I ever seen this.” Vilgax shot him a glare, silently asking him to shut his bitch ass up. Apparently, the Moon entered an anti-spin phase triggered by the anomaly back on Earth. Maybe this was the reason for the aimless flight and how long it took to find the Moon in the first place. The uncertainty was killing you; you wanted to know, you wanted to scream just to know something was real.

You pit on a safety suit your father gave you from the pile of things he packed in a rush when you two left Bellwood. It wasn’t really an astronaut suit, but it mimicked it to a fault. He put his own on and helped you in yours, making sure you were completely secure inside. We don’t want our precious immune human to go floating in outter space frozen to death in 0.01 seconds, do we my dear? Just imagine the cold and purple hue your skin would have, something similar to cobold blue maybe devoided of any reds and warmth it once had. And a last frigid breath being pushed out of your lungs from the pressure your frozen organs would have on your poor lungs. You would look magestic.

“We must stay focused on our objective, humans. Tellurium crystals. That’s what we need the most at the moment.” His voice was serious all the time but now it sounded even more commanding and emotionless. He treated you and Leonard like you were soldiers in his army or guards in the Knight Hood, not allies… Alies, with the Chimeran Warlord… life was fucked up for sure if this was happening.

Once out of the ship, you tried to stay as close as you could to the two men, but you were slower. No, not slower; just more cautious and afraid. You’ve never been in outter space before, you never roamed foreign lands on Earth, let alone on another cosmic body. It was a very uncanny feeling to jump instead of walk and to feel a slight pleasurable pressure in your lower back. It was almost the same as the feeling one has when going downhill fast in a car and not having your seatbelt on. That moment when you felt a shudder run down your spine and in that moment… you’d float. You called out to them, asking them to slow down. But there wasn’t any time because-

The Moon Stopped Spinning

Suddenly, the whole moon stopped its already slow rotation and the Earth started to look bigger and bigger each passing second. “Quick, back to The Hammer!” In a few seconds, you were picked up by your father and he ran to the ship. In a few moments he also got picked up with you still in his arms by Vilgax, and the alien managed to get all of you in the ship as fast as you can say ‘candy cane’.The scene would have been worthy of a silly low-budget comedy have it not been so terrifying in the moment.

The warlord assumed his spot in the cockpit once more and booted up the systems, and emergency started a flight command. “It caught onto our plan, we cannot go any further with it. Buckle up… I’m not waiting to fall down now-” Someone once told you light speed was the fastest speed to ever exist. Well today you learned panicked huge alien squid speed was faster. The work your father had put in the teleported payed of as it crancked up right when you were about to fall back into the atmosphere. The engines got full power, trusters burning hot and accelerator going past any past limit. This was the end, this was pure adrenaline. This was your life now.

“Y/N…? Sweetie…? Where are you?”

We know, guided by Gatsi's opinion, that these mosaics belong to an early age of Tevinter. So they are supposed to be earlier than the presence of the Qunari in Thedas. Even though Gatsi does a good job to read these mosaics, I want to be very aware that his vision and interpretation of them tend to be based on modern biases, specially andrastian one.

We also know that all of them [at least the original ones] were made by the same person, a woman that Gatsi describes as having a deep knowledge of the stone, being Tevinter, and dealing with self-hate. I personally wonder how much of a possibility is for her to be a dwarven too, since the relationship between dwarves and Tevinter is really old and predates the blights.

The title of the following sections offers a link to Gatsi’s original explanation of each mosaic.

The Mason's Tales: Freed Are Slaves

Information given by Gatsi:

Gatsi implies that this mosaic shows something different from what its title means.

This carving has been done with two different hands meaning the original one was modified later. It implies that the magister and his company replaced seven figures that were in the original version.

The slaved qunaris are from the original piece.

Speculations and inferences:

The slaved qunaris are from the original piece, so this means that qunari existed and were slaved to Tevinter long time ago before the first record of seeing them in Thedas. This makes more concrete the idea dropped by Corypheus about the Qunari being a crafted race / mistake that was tried to be hidden a posteriori.

If originally there were seven figures, it seems reasonable to suspect they used to represent the original sidereal magisters that entered the city. Shamed by the responsibility of being the reason why the Blights developed later, the mosaic may have suffered this change in the amount of leader figures on top of the slaves. Or like Gatsi says, maybe a rich person acquired the mosaic and wanted to be part of it. 

The Mason's Tales: Invasion

Information given by Gatsi:

He identifies seven magisters. Only five detailed. The other two have been chipped away with a rock [probably vandalism, done poorly due to lack of time or fear]

He suspects that those that were chipped away displayed symbols that may have brought some conflicts.

There are no stairs.

The castle is too high, giving the impression that it's falling on its own weight. [He says this is obvious for anyone with a sense of Stone, which gives the impression that the information we are receiving here is that this place belonged to the Fade, where the physics are unnatural, The Laws of Nature in the Fade]

There is a mishmash of styles. He is expecting only Tevinter, but he can see elven style in the background

Speculations and inferences:

We can see the drawing much better in the concept art. The perspective messes a bit the shapes.

The magister far at the left seems to have a spike-hat and, what caught my attention a lot, seems to be bare-feet. Which is an impossible habit for a Tevinter, but a natural thing for an elf [1].

The second magister on the left, close to the camera, has a bald head and a symbol of an eye. Along the game, there are many symbols of the like: we have seen one in the mural of Titan's heart: a single eye on its  head [5]. There is also an ancient constellation currently called Visus, which represents an eye with “spikes”, similar to this symbol. Sadly, we only have the explanation with chantry biases. It seems that the ancient interpretation has been lost [these ancient interpretations predated Tevinter Imperium and some of them seem to be related to Elvhen]. Another Eye I found in concept art is Flemeth herself. Sadly, none of these eyes reproduces exactly that symbol. 

I'm not so sure if we can assume that the symbol on the back of the magister is Urthemiel's hat or Falon’Din’s.

The third magister seems to have a strange hat with many pointy things. It's not clear if the pointy extensions at the sides of the head are pointy ears. It could suggest another elf.

Two magisters have a staff. One of them looks like a three or two headed-dragon staff [not sure if we can relate it to Tyrdda's Staff model, or to staff of corruption, the other, the one called Architect's Legacy or stormbreak.

The background looks like elvhen architecture 

The Mason's Tales: Sacrifice

Mosaic that shows two hands: meaning the original mosaic was altered later.

It has detailed faces of those who are sacrificing creatures. It means they wanted to be remembered. They are important people.

The sculptor hates this scene, so she carved a "do not do this" mosaic.

Gatsi suspects the sculptor to know the stone deeply [he says it in the mosaic of Freed are slaves] and suspects she is Tevinter who hates these Tevinter costumes. He describes it as self-hate.

He identifies the many skulls around as representation of sacrifices, but two of them stand out: two horned skulls of bigger size that remind him of Qunari. He understands it's natural to see qunari so early in the history to appear in these mosaics simply because the hate that Tevinter has to them in the way they treat mages.

He suspects the presence of Qunari so early motivated the Magisters to rush into the invasion to the Fade.

He identifies a third Qunari: the victim in the middle. But its horns have been chipped off to make it look like a human sacrifice.

Speculations and inferences:

Clearly for the player, this mosaic, in combination with Kieran's words and Corypheus' words in the final battle, gives us a good hint to consider the Qunari not only a crafted race, but most probably created by Tevinter as sacrifices to potentiate their blood magic rituals.

The faces of those who observe the sacrifice are, in my opinion, covered with masks. Some of them remind me a lot to the profile of the Colossus statues, others look like wearing masks of demons or even Orlesian ones, which makes no sense. [updated note below]

It’s interesting how they removed the horns from the central figure here, but not on the skulls or in the mosaic Freed are slaved. My supposition is that this sacrifice may have been an important figure among the qunari, maybe a rebel, maybe one of the few figures from the Qun which image would have increased the rage and feed rebellion of the slaved qunaris. Another possibility is that it would give the idea that sacrificing qunari provides more power [or harder consequences] than using elves.

Some of these masks seem to have a slight resemblance to the dragon masks/skulls we saw in DAO.

[updated note]: It makes a lot of sense for these Tevinter masks to remind us the Colossus, simply because they belong to Tevinter design. There are a set of images where the devs gathered all the elements of Tevinter to have an overall idea of how its design looks like, and in it, they added the Colossus, so it seems reasonable to assume this is Tevinter. 

On the other hand, There it a drawing in the Chant of Light from the book World of thedas Vol. 2  which depicts an Old God whispering that looks pretty close to these Colossus as well as the masks. [the ironical resemblance of these profiles to Thane from Mass Effect may not be casual]

  The Mason's Tales: The Archdemon

Information given by Gatsi:

He says it represents a single archdemon, and head is a reaction to one of the lines coming from the magisters.

There are seven magisters

The dragon doesn’t care about the magisters that seems to hit it, however, it gives an eyeful to the one who misses the ray. 

There are no faces on the Magisters, so they are not important. There is a purpose on this: she wanted to carve Tevinter ages itself, so these magisters are, in fact, Tevinter ages: four ages of Tevinter where they are part of the dragon, two of them where they damage it, and one where they miss the point entirely and eats them.

Speculations and inferences:

I wonder if this is truly an archdemon, considering these carvings may have been older than the time of the Blights, this is why I like the concept that Gatsi explains: about being part of the dragon, or the "old god"

The concept art calls this piece “dragons”.

This mosaic is totally original, without alterations.

Sadly, there is not much to speculate about this mosaic because the games have not given a lot of information about the “ages of Tevinter”.  There is not much information to understand what means “ages when Tevinter was part of the Dragon” or “Ages that hurt the Dragon”. Tevinter is a very old Imperium, and its History has never been shared in the South, apart from the Chantry version of the invasion to the Golden City. 

The Mason's Tales: The Fall

Information given by Gatsi:

He remarks that the characters are in fire.

The seven magisters entered the city and became “blighted” [even though he has just said fire a moment ago], unable to distinguish which way is up as a form to represent madness.

Gatsi explains a detailed polish technique that seems to be on the tower and on the bearded skull mainly, and a bit more on the rest: it makes the stone look like a glass and shine, as if they were burning

The bearded skull was the main target of this effect, the one who may have "opened" the door.

Speculations and inferences:

I like the concept of the fire, because despite being blighted, Corypheus and Architect both have a design that seems to imply that their skins were melted, not only blighted.

The beardy skull may have been Corypheus, as leader of the sidereal magisters. However, it’s strange since it has pointy ears.

Gatsi is assuming every figure here is a Tevinter (human), but the main target has pointy ears

The background shows typical elvhen towers falling, which makes sense since it has been implied in Trespasser that the Golden City may have been an elvhen palace.

There is not much "blight" in this scene, but fire. It makes you wonder what this event was about and how much of this event has been reflected in local tales where fire consumes people or cities.