“The Chantry teaches us that it is the hubris of men which brought the darkspawn
into this world. The mages sought to usurp heaven, and in so doing, they destroyed it.”
So spoke Duncan, Warden-Commander in the Kingdom of Ferelden, in the 30th year of the Dragon Age,
on the dawn of the fifth blight. Throughout the history of Thedas, five times have the darkspawn
poured out of their subterranean breeding grounds, each time with a massive draconic
archdemon at their head, each time bringing devastation to the realm. In this video,
we will explore the origin of Thedas’ most wicked and brutal natural phenomenon,
and the events of the First Blight, the longest and most devastating war in Thedosian history.
395 years before the founding of the Chantry, when the Tevinter Imperium was still the mightiest
Empire in the land, Corypheus the Conductor, High Priest of Dumat, the Dragon of Silence,
began receiving visions. According to the Canticle of Silence, an apocryphal verse
in the Chantry’s liturgy, Dumat spoke thus to Corypheus: “Open the gates. To my Golden City,
you must sojourn. At the foot of my throne, I shall anoint you, most favoured of my disciples,
and I shall raise you up to godhood, that all mortals shall know your glory.”
Corypheus became obsessed with achieving these visions, yet bypassing the veil that divided
the waking and spiritual realms, let alone reaching the seat of the Gods, would take an
unfathomable amount of raw magical force. So it was that Corypheus went to his esteemed peer, a
mage known simply as the Architect, High Priest of Urthemiel, the Dragon of Beauty. Upon being asked
to aid Corypheus in ascending to the Heavens, the Architect conferred with Urthemiel in his dreams.
Urthemiel responded in kind with a vision, commanding the Architect to aid Corypheus in
helping man ascend to the heavens, not to the end of helping Corypheus become a god, but so
Urthemiel could make his chosen servant a god in Corypheus’ stead. Thus, the Architect agreed to
help the Conductor in this vainest of projects. However, even between the two of them,
they had not the power or resources to force open a physical passage into the fade. To that end,
they recruited the five other High Priests of the five other Dragons: The Watchman of Lusacan,
the Forgewright of Toth, the Appraiser of Andoral, the Augur of Razikale, and the Madman of Zazikel.
Each one of these mighty magisters had received a vision from their Gods,
telling them to help Corypheus enter heaven, and that when the time came, it would be they, and not
any of their peers, who achieved apotheosis. Thus, with the magisters all agreeing to work together,
while secretly planning to betray each other, mankind embarked on his quest to usurp Heaven.
In the following months, the seven High Priests, now known as the Magisters Sidereal, began
labouring in preparation to enter the Golden City. The cost would be enormous: two thirds of the all
of lyrium in the entire Empire, alongside the lives of thousands of slaves, mostly Elves,
whose life-blood was spilt to fuel the Magisters’ spells. These macabre efforts bore fruit,
for the lyrium and the blood sacrifices caused the veil to rip open, creating a passage for
the Magisters to enter the spirit world in the flesh. And in so doing, they doomed the world.
So it is written in the Canticle of Threnodies: “And so is the Golden City blackened with each
step you take in my hall. Marvel at perfection, for it is fleeting. You have brought sin
to heaven, and doom upon all the world.” In the modern Dragon Age, no two legends or
faiths can agree what happened when the haughty High Priests stepped foot into the Golden City.
The Chantry teaches that the Maker instead greeted the Magisters, the Chantry’s one true God,
who cast the magisters out of heaven, and cast the Old Gods out of the Fade, sealing the primordial
Draconic beings in prisons deep beneath the earth in the physical realm. Other sources,
however, claim that when the Magisters entered into the City of the Gods, it was black as shadow,
its throne laying empty. Either way, the Magisters were forced to return to the physical world,
not as gods, but as corrupted ghouls, for their time in the realm of Gods had tainted
their hearts and their bodies, making them into a new type of twisted being: the first darkspawn.
Upon their return, any mortals who beheld the newly blighted forms of the Magisters
would themselves become darkspawn, and thus, a new wicked race was introduced to the land.
Although the Darkspawn are inherently vicious beings, they are usually too disorganized to be
an existential threat. That is until they awaken an Archdemon. Deep in their subterranean prison,
the Old Gods sing a slumbering song, beckoning the darkspawn unto them. Whenever the darkspawn
uncover one of the Old Gods, their presence both awakens and taints the ancient Dragon, turning it
into an Archdemon. This blighted divinity then assumes control of all Darkspawn, turning them
into a single horde capable of threatening all civilization on Thedas. The first Old God to be
transformed into an archdemon was Dumat, and upon his awakening, the first blight began.
Although the coming cataclysm was devastating to all races and tribes, it was the Dwarves who
were by far hit the hardest. Having built their vast Empire deep beneath the earth,
it was in their realm in which the Darkspawn first emerged. Moreover, the First Blight could not have
come at a worst time for Dwarf kind. Although they were, in theory, a unified Empire united
under a High King in Kal-Sharok, in practice, each of the great Dwarven Thaigs ran their own affairs,
and often bickered with one another in feuds that could last generations. Moreover, Dwarven society
was deeply stratified, divided into castes, with those being born into the upper and middle castes,
like warriors, smiths and miners, having inherently more rights and privileges than born
into the lower servant castes, or worse yet, the casteless, who were not even considered people.
As such, when the Blight came upon Thedas’ grand underground Empire, Dwarven society was
caught gridlocked amidst neverending internecine bickering and a bitter social class struggle.
Before long, the darkspawn horde emerged onto the deep roads. Soon, the vast underground
highways which had connected great Thaigs across thousands of miles became infested, as Darkspawn
swarmed out unto them like venom through a body’s arteries. The Dwarves, divided and distracted,
were caught completely by surprise, and at the onset, completely failed to organize a unified
defensive line. Nearly overnight, countless cities were raised by the caustic horde, and the majority
of the Dwarva’s history and cultural achievements were lost forever. Eventually, the leaders of the
stout race united under a single King, Aeducan, under whose leadership the Dwarves finally managed
to stem the Darkspawn advance. However, this came at a massive cost, for huge swaths of the
deep roads had to be blocked off and countless more Thaigs abandoned to their fate in order to
ensure the survival of the four largest Dwarven cities: Gundaar, Hormak, Kal Sharok and Orzammar.
A beacon of hope for the Dwarves came when one of their most brilliant smiths, Caradin,
discovered the secret to forging Golems: huge automatons of steel or stone which were both
near indestructible in battle and immune to being infected by Darkspawn taint. These Golems became
the backbone of the Dwarven army, and even allowed them to retake lost Thaigs and stretches of the
Deep Roads which had previously been given up for lost. However, these victories came,
once again, at a bitter cost, for the creation of a golem required the soul of a living dwarf to be
sacrificed and woven into its steel-clad body. At first, many Dwarves volunteered for this,
sacrificing themselves so they might become an instrument of war to save their race,
yet before long, the volunteer pool dried up, but the Darkspawn threat remained dire.
To compensate for this, Dwarven Kings began forcefully putting criminals, the casteless,
and political dissidents in Golem bodies. When Caridin objected to this, he was himself forcibly
turned into a Golem. However, unlike other Golems, he retained his autonomy of free will. To put a
stop to the involuntary harvesting of dwarven souls, Caridin reclaimed the Anvil of the Void,
the lyrium-infused device which was used to create Golems, and vanished with it deep
into the blighted Deep Roads. Now deprived of the ability to make more steel juggernauts,
the advances the Dwarves had made on the Darkspawn were turned back around.
With near complete control of the Deep Roads, the Darkspawn horde controlled a
crucial infrastructural network that they could use to surface almost anywhere at any time.
Thus, when the Blight came upon the world of men, it did so nearly everywhere at once, leaving the
armies of the Tevinter Imperium scrambling in their attempts to create a solid defensive front.
Wherever the Darkspawn struck, the land around was sucked of moisture,
blackening the earth and turning plants to dust. The skies filled with rolling black clouds
that blocked the sun. Disease and rot followed. Huge swathes of the territory became unlivable,
and no matter how many Darkspawn were struck down, there were always more to take their place.
During their raiding and pillaging, the Darkspawn would often take human, dwarf
and elf women captive, bringing them to their underground nests, and forcing them to undergo
a horrific process that transformed them into twisted, bloated beings known as Broodmothers,
which were capable of birthing new Darkspawn in the thousands. Different Broodmothers produced
different kinds of darkspawn, which resembled the race it had once been. Dwarven broodmothers
spawned genlocks, human broodmothers spawned hurlocks, elven broodmothers spawned shrieks.
Most terrifying of all, broodmothers who had once belonged to a mysterious race
of horned giants known as the Kossith spawned massive, brutish shock troopers known as ogres.
If all this was not bad enough, the Archdemon Dumat would show himself on the field on more
than one occasion. A deadly, draconic force to be reckoned with, Dumat was capable of
slaying thousands, and even when he was slain by brave warriors, which happened on more than one
occasion, he would immediately revive: his spirit simply possessing the nearest living darkspawn,
which promptly transformed back into a massive, blighted wyrm when infused with the Archdemon’s
soul. Indeed, it seemed as if the horde was unending and its leader unkillable.
For over a century, the Blight continued, and entire generations lived and died,
knowing only violence and pestilence in their lives.
Barbarian tribes on the fringes of Thedas, like the Alamarri, Rivaini, and the Ciriane
were overrun, while in the Tevinter Imperium, the fabric of society unraveled. The imperial masses,
who for generations had worshiped the seven Old Gods, were thrown into a crisis of faith when
faced with the fact that the blight was being led by their own sacred Dragon Dumat, while
the other six, when offered gifts and prayers for salvation, responded only with silence.
In a cathartic fury, the citizens of the Empire lashed out against the religious leaders who had
failed them, forming mobs that burned down temples to the Old Gods and strung up their priests.
Truly, it was the darkest of times. And yet, it was when the hour was bleakest that the world
was given a glimmer of hope. 305 years before the founding of the Chantry, a special order
of warriors was founded in the mountains of the Anderfels in the fortress of Weisshaupt. They were
the Gray Wardens and would bring salvation to the land. Unlike the rest of Thedas’ institutions, the
Gray wardens cared not for their members' race or faith, taking on Dwarves, Elves, and Humans alike.
Each member underwent a special ritual known as the joining, in which they ingested the toxic
blood of the Darkspawn. This was an extremely dangerous process that killed most of its
participants. Those who survived emerged enhanced, possessed of a deep connection with the Darkspawn,
able to sense when they were near, and able to hear the call of the Archdemon,
thus giving them an immense advantage in the battle against the horde.
Riding atop massive Griffons, the Gray Wardens took to the field, and found great success over
the horde. Crushing victories over the darkspawn in places like Nordbotten created a much-needed
boost in morale across Thedas, rallying Tevinter Magisters and Barbarian Chieftains alike behind
the Wardens' cause. Yet, the blight continued, for the Wardens had yet to make the ultimate
sacrifice. As previously mentioned, if an average person strikes the killing blow on an Archdemon,
its spirit is released and travels to the nearest soulless darkspawn. The only one
capable of permanently killing an Archdemon is a Grey Warden. When a Warden strikes the deathblow,
the Archdemon's spirit still passes to the nearest tainted creature, but that creature is the Warden.
Since the Warden has a soul, the attempt by the Archdemon to possess the Warden fails,
destroying both souls in the process. 203 years before the founding of the Chantry,
a grand coalition of human forces, consisting of the remaining armies of the Tevinter Imperium and
the barbarian tribes of the Ciriane and Rivaini, joined with a stalwart legion of Dwarves,
and faced down the Archdemon Dumat and his endless hordes at the Battle of the Silent Plains.
It was one of the bloodiest days in Thedosian history, with over a third of the allied forces
cut down. Yet, it was all worth it, for in the carnage, a fateful Gray Warden, whose name has
been lost to time, got in close enough to Dumat to strike a fatal blow upon him- joining his soul
to the archdemon, and destroying it forever. Deprived of their leader, the Darkspawn horde
was figuratively decapitated, and they fled back underground in droves. The first blight was over.
As the darkspawn retreated back into the bowels of the earth from whence they came,
much of Thedas rejoiced. Yet, for many, victory over the blight which had terrorized them for
generations was a bitter draught. One blight had been defeated, but there were six remaining
Draconic Old Gods imprisoned deep beneath the earth, meaning future generations would have six
more blights to contend with. For the Dwarves, the first blight never truly ended. Although without
an archdemon to guide them, the darkspawn did not terrorize the humans of the surface world,
they still infested the subterranean Deep Roads and Thaigs which they had taken from the Dwarva,
using them as staging grounds to bore deeper into the earth in search of Archdemons to awaken.
While the world above enjoyed peace, the war below ranged on. Before long, the Thaigs of
Gundaar and Hormak had fallen, leaving the cities of Kal Sharok and Orzammar as the only bastions
of Dwarven civilization left on Thedas. As for the Gray Wardens, whose order had
saved Thedas, their reward was a slow and excruciating death.
Tainted with darkspawn blood, each warden only had some twenty or thirty years to live. After that,
their tainted blood would begin to corrupt their bodies, transforming them into a subservient ghoul
like any other in the horde. Knowing this to be their fate, the Wardens developed a ritual known
as the Calling, in which, when their time came, they would venture into the darkspawn-infested
deep roads and slay as many monsters as they could before being overwhelmed and killed:
a preferable alternative to transforming into the very creatures their order was born to slay.
In the aftermath of the First Blight, the Tevinter Imperium was deeply shaken. Once the most powerful
nation in Thedas, it was now a palace built on a foundation of sand: their gods turned
against them, the hubris of their magisters responsible for unfathomable destruction, and
their armies weakened by the blight said magisters had unleashed. It was in this environment that a
humble woman, a slave, would claim to be the bride of the One True God, and lead a holy rebellion
that would liberate the long-suffering Elves and Barbarian tribes, bring the Empire to its knees,
and ensure that thenceforth, magic would serve mankind, rather than mankind be slaves to mages.
In our next episode on the history of Thedas, we will cover Andraste’s rebellion, so if
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