feynites:

kvrnsteins:

flmeth:

She was the best of them. She cared for her people. She protected them.

#I am ABSOLUTELY convinced that the reason that she isn’t as derogatory about the dalish  #as the other two  #is that she lived the intervening centuries  #she saw how much was stolen from them  #how much the loss of their culture and their magic–however flawed it was–damaged them  #and how far they climbed back  #with nothing but their will and their hands and their stories to do it with  #she didn’t wake to a degraded people  #she saw a living people not only surviving but striving for more (via)

She watched it happen.

However badly the elves have it now, it must have been an incredible nightmare immediately after the Veil went up. Cities fell. Literally; they were in the sky and they fell. Whole communities got wiped out. Elves got stuck with their consciousness in one place and their body in another. People who had spent their entire lives doing stuff with magic, suddenly couldn’t use it. Or only some of them could, but inconsistently. They were cut off from spirits. Nothing worked anymore. They went from the magical equivalent of our level of technology, to the stone age, in a bloody and relatively unexpected cataclysm.

Solas… I don’t think he saw that. I think he knew, intellectually, that it would be a disaster. But I don’t think, since Trespasser, that he actually saw it. I think he slept through most of that period, when the mortality first set in, and elves were starving, and living in the ruins of their empire, and having to figure out how to light a fire without magic. And then invaders came, and enslaved them. All that fighting to ‘free’ them, and what did it amount to? Some years of exceedingly harsh survival, followed by enslavement. Again.

And then centuries of that enslavement. Of having their new ‘masters’ pick their own culture clean for the bits they liked, and denying it from them. Magisters examining elven techniques and lore while passing laws that prohibit their elven slaves from reading. Using their blood in rituals. Walking on their backs to try and reach those same lofty heights that the evanuris had reached for.

But the elves survived.

Hit after hit, and any of them could have wiped them out. They could have died after the Veil went up. They could have faded away beneath the crushing weight of Tevinter. Mythal watched them take punch after punch after punch, and stay standing. Arlathan. The Veil. Tevinter. Orlais. She has definitely seen these people spend centuries living just one step away from complete genocide, and yet, they’re still here. They’ve fought. They’ve bent their knees when they needed to, bowed their heads, sent their loved ones running while they accepted death to buy them time. They’ve smuggled the gemstones of their culture in secret, in songs and whispers and totems tucked beneath their rags, and they’ve pieced together new maps of faith and resilience that are their own.

The elves of Thedas have been on the brink of annihilation since before humans even came to their continent.

But they aren’t gone yet.

And I think, after seeing all of that, it would be impossible for Mythal to mistake them for weak. Whatever plans she does or does not have, she’s seen her people survive what must surely have seemed like surefire extinction time, and time, and time again. It takes a certain kind of fool to witness that sort of resilience and discount it, and Mythal’s not that fool.