#stalgard

I really wish we could have spent more time in Kal-Sharok and among the dwarves there. And maybe speak with Valta again.

Prompts for Harding Appreciation week hosted by @datvcompanionweeks are:

Kinship | Ancestors

Stalgard,

I was so happy to receive your letter! After our last meeting I was sure you’d have quite enough of me for the rest of your life. I’m glad to see I was wrong.

Congratulations on completing your guard duty and getting back to your midwife training, I am sure it must be a nice change of pace. 

I’ve been wondering if I could stay in Kal-Sharok for longer next time. I have never seen a thaig before, never been to a true dwarven city, but still as soon as we came through those gates when we met the first time I felt a sense of belonging I didn’t expect. I have never been this close to the Stone and the Ancestors before!

But maybe I shouldn’t think about it this way anymore, after all the Titans created both the caves and the hills of Thedas, so I am never too far away from them. 

I don’t think I could abandon the sky and Ferelden for a life underground, but I feel like I could still learn so much from you. And if all goes well maybe we could share the memories of the Titan with more dwarves of Kal-Sharok. I hope they would want to experience it, Maker knows the Sheparate of Orzammar was not interested in what I had to say. For a bunch claiming to be revering their Ancestors they seem painfully uninterested in the actual history. 

Please give Durra my best wishes and I hope we will meet again.

Until then, stay safe, 

I am in no way a dwarf lore person, but I love a good, mysterious history, so ramblings ahead:

So I just went to visit the Oracle with Harding in the Kal-Sharok outpost with Harding (and Davrin), and there were so many little tidbits all over the place in the outpost and in the deep roads.

First, lyrium is everywhere and they aren't particularly mining it. What they're doing is excavating the old settlement. You see dwarves digging structures and statues out everywhere.

What I find super interesting is all of the plaques on the statues that hypothesize who it depicts, note where it was found, and what era it likely came from. It's done with the scientific care yet not 100% certainty of archaeologists.

Unlike the dwarves of Orzemar, who write all of the history in the Shaperate, and what is not written cannot be history, the Kal-Sharok dwarves are curious and open-minded students of history, trying to reclaim what was lost.

There is a Gray Warden in a dining hall looking room, talking with one of the dwarves, and the conversation goes something like this,

Dwarf: "Once the outpost is complete, the Gray Wardens are welcome here." Warden: "This used to be a trading outpost. Will you do that again?" Dwarf: "We already have all we need to survive without trade."

This is paraphrasing. If someone else has the exact text, please do correct me.

But that sounds super ominous, considering the whole think about Kal-Sharok dwarves changing themselves in order to survive.

On that, Stalgard is tight-lipped, saying it's a long story. (So tell us!! But really, I love a good mystery element to fantasy worlds, and with the elven mysteries largely revealed, I'm excited for dwarves now.) He does admit that they had to become like darkspawn to survive and observes that Harding is staring and likely, "Looking for the taint that you know to be there." Moreover, he can sense the Blight and how this Blight is different that usual, but he says only some Kal-Sharok dwarves can.

There are a few momentos you can find that hint that perhaps the distinct armor all the Kal-Sharok dwarves wear may be connected to this "changing" and yet survival:

Is the constant blight something in their blood, genetically now? They aren't cut off the way they were before, and yet they are still "changed" compared to the Orzemar and related surface dwarves.

"More than one way to die" for Paragon Metez makes me wonder if he was getting ghoulish by the time he was "The Reborn" and took up the smithing hammer, presumably to make the prototype of the armors you see literally every Kal-Sharok dwarf wearing. This gets a bit tinfoil-hat-ish here, but the armor does have a lyrium blue sheen to it. I wonder if the good lyrium (blood of Titans) helps them to counteract the taint of the blight (nightmares of the Titans) in their mortal, dwarf blood. The armor seems to cover them from neck to toe. I wonder if it was like the Titan guardians in "The Decent" DLC from Inquisition, in that it was fused to their skin and one with them.

And then there's Davrin, who Stalgard greets in Dwarven and who Davrin greets in kind. Living apart for centuries, even with a unified writing system, the Orzemar and Kal-Sherok languages would have shifted dramatically apart. Davrin knows the Kal-Sherok dialect (or language at this point), and Stalgard knows that he knows it. We don't get a translation, so I'm curious what exactly was said other than a general, "hello." Where did you get that from, Davrin? And what other Wardens besides him and the Warden in the dining hall personally know Kal-Sharok dwarves. Is it an institutional level connection, or just a few people that the Kal-Sharok "watchers" trust?

There is also a pair of Dwarves in the main outpost who talk about life above the surface. One mentions being a "watcher" in Hossberg for a time. The other is curious about Minrathous (where neither have been) and then they wax poetic about warm rain. Both are puzzled by the idea that Orzemar dwarves fear the sky.

Was there supposed to be a Kal-Sharok connection in the Hossberg Wetlands that got abandoned due to time constraints?

Those two dwarves also keep referring to the outpost as "up here" versus "back home" being "down there." This is decidedly not the city of Kal-Sharok, or even an extension of it. It's a separate outpost. Kal-Sharok is deeper underground. I really wonder if this is a part of the same trading outpost in the mountains that the second part of Harding's quest takes us to. The architecture seems similar, but they're not actually connected in the maps we can navigate.

I fucking love this guy. Stalgard, I will rescue your ass any day.

Stalgard: yes

Rook: