During the darkest years of the ancient age, the Elvhen, a slave race, tore off their
chains. Joining forces with the divinely guided Andraste and her army of righteous
barbarian tribesmen to their former Tevinter slavemasters to their knees. For their efforts,
the Elven people were given a homeland of their own for the first time in millennia.
And yet, three centuries later, the very same religion the Elves had helped create
had returned to their doorstep. In a firestorm of religious and ethnic turmoil, the culture,
faith and identity of the ancient Elvhen would once more be pushed to the brink of extinction.
In this latest episode on the world of Dragon Age, we will cover the exalted march on the Dales.
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Before exploring the fall of the second Elven homeland, we should dial back the clock and recap
its entire history. After successfully liberating the whole of southern Thedas, then betraying his
wife to the Empire to secure his land gains, Maferath, the grand chieftain of the Alemarri,
kept his massive new holdings in the family, dividing them between himself and his three sons,
with one exception. As a reward for fighting alongside Andraste’s faithful against the
Imperium, Maferath decreed that the Elves would have a homeland of their own, granting them the
lush, thickly forested land of the Dales, located in what is now southeastern Orlais.
Across northern Thedas, hundreds of thousands of Elvhen, the overwhelming majority of whom were
born into slavery and grew up in chains, began walking to their new promised land.
Many died on this trek, which involved cutting across thousands of miles of treacherous,
untamed wilderness. Set upon by human bandits and wild animals while perishing from exposure
and starvation, many began to despair and consider returning to their Imperial masters. “At least in
Tevinter,” they said, “we had food, water, and shelter. What do we have here? Nothing but the
open sky and the prospect of the never-ending road ahead.” And although some individuals would peel
away from the flock and return to their masters, the vast majority’s resolve never broke and made
it to their destination. There, they founded the city of Halamshiral, which in the ancient
Elvish tongue means “the end of the journey.” Finally independent once more, the Elves were
finally free to return to the old ways of ancient Elvhenan, speak their original tongue, and worship
their original gods. However, this was easier said than done. Countless generations of slavery under
the Tevinters had stripped the Elven people of most of their language, culture, and history.
What survived was a patchwork of folk stories, legends, and a smattering of words and phrases
of the old Elvish tongue passed down in secret from slave mothers to slave children.
The Hahren, or Elders of the Dales, did their best to gather up all these scraps of remaining
knowledge and stitch them back up into a coherent tapestry. Despite this, many of the truths of
ancient Elvhenan were now lost. For instance, the Elves of the Dales worshipped the Evunaris, the
nine supreme beings of the Elven pantheon. They believed the Evunaris to be benevolent Gods who
bestowed their ancient forebears with the gifts of the earth: with Sylaise the Hearthkeeper having
given the elves the gift of fire, Dirthamen the Keeper of Secrets having given the elves the gift
of knowledge, June, God of the Craft having given the elves the gift of artisanship, and so on.
The Dalish Elves also believed that Fen’harel was an evil trickster who, out of jealousy and
malicious treachery, deceived the Evanuris into sealing themselves away in the fade,
known to them as “the Beyond,” which is ultimately why the ancient Elvhen lost their immortality,
why Arlathan fell, and why the ancestors of the Dalish were condemned to a millennium of slavery.
The fact that the Evanuris were not true gods but simply extremely powerful mages, they had not
been benevolent beings but instead tyrannical despots, and that Fen’harel was more akin to
a freedom fighter than a scheming trickster were all truths that had been lost to time.
In spite of the fact that this new nation’s perception of its people's history was more
fairytale than reality, it still became a Kingdom that achieved a level of beauty and sophistication
that only the Elves were capable of. Within only a few generations, the Dales had become a land
of marble palaces and gardens woven seamlessly into the natural woodland landscape. It was a
far cry from Ancient Elvhenan, which had been a literal dreamscape that transcended metaphysical
dimensions, but it was a land of beauty nonetheless. The Elves were, of course, armed.
Never again would they be slaves, and to protect their freedoms, they founded the Emerald Knights,
an order of warriors devoted to protecting the borders of the Dales. Each knight rode into
battle atop a type of sacred deer called a halla with a wolf companion who fought at their side.
Initially, the relationship between the Dalish nation and their tribal human neighbours was good.
After all, both the elves and southern menfolk had been tempered in the same baptism of fire,
fighting side by side to win their freedom from the Tevinter Imperium. Yet, the Elves would
soon discover that human memory can be short, especially when clouded by the righteousness of
religious zealotry. As we have covered previously, in the centuries after Andrastes’ martyrdom, the
world of humans underwent a rapid metamorphosis as the invincible warlord Drakon forged the mighty
Orlesian Empire through fire and blood, spreading his version of the Andrastian faith by the point
of a spear and founding the Chantry, the religious institution which would come to govern the vast
majority of humanity on Thedas. Emperor Drakon considered himself a righteous uniter, but the
Elves looked upon his aggressively expansionist policies with alarm, seeing echoes of tyrannical,
despotic Tevinter in the newly ascendant Orlais. As such, the Dalish Kingdom severed
diplomatic ties with their human neighbours and adopted a policy of near-total isolationism.
The growing enmity was mutual. It was a core Andrastian belief that only when the Chant
of Light had spread to all the peoples of Thedas would the Maker return to the world and make it a
paradise. By now, almost all humans were adherents of either the Orlesian or Tevinter Chantries,
but the nonhuman peoples of the continent were not. The Dwarves of Orzammar were not
a realistic target of proselytization for the Maker’s faithful. The stout mountain dwellers
were the continent’s chief supplier of priceless lyrium, a crucial trade which could be disrupted
if the Church ired the Dwarves by insisting on sending missionaries into their lands.
No such commercial interests protected the Dalish Kingdom, who, despite having
been founded by slaves who had once fought alongside Andraste herself, had turned their
backs on the word of the Maker and re-embraced the heathen idols of their misguided ancestors.
Tensions between Orlais and the Dales worsened after the outbreak of the Second Blight,
during which the elvhen refused to help the Orlesians, maintaining their strict
policy of isolationism even as the lands of their neighbours were reduced to a bubous[?] wasteland.
It is even said that, in year 25 of the Divine Age, when the Darkspawn besieged
the Orlesian city of Montsimmard, an elven army watched on a nearby hill and did nothing.
After Orlais emerged from the blight, bloodied but victorious,
the Chantry began sending missionaries into the Dales. When these priestesses were turned away,
the Chantry sent armed holy templars into elven lands in their place. By the end of the divine age
and the beginning of the glory age, human-elven tensions were pressurized to explode as the
Chantry began spreading lies about Elves using human infants as sacrifices in blood rituals.
Soon, small-scale skirmishes became common along the border between the Dales and Orlais.
As is so often the case, the road to total war was paved in a story of misunderstanding
and personal tragedy. In the ninth year of the glory age, an elven woman was killed,
murdered by human hunters for having unknowingly strayed over the Orlesian border. Siona,
the woman’s sister and an emerald knight, swore vengeance in a fit of rage and grief. In this,
she sought the aid of her brother, Elandrin, who was also an Emerald Knight. Elandrin refused. As
much as he grieved for losing his youngest sister, he refused to raise a finger against humankind.
Later, it was revealed why: he had fallen in love with Adalene,
a human girl from the town of Red Crossing. Siona was blinded by rage. She had lost one
sibling to human swords, she would not suffer to lose another to the human God. With a commando of
Emerald Knights, she rode to Red Crossing to find her brother and force him to come home.
When they arrived at the hamlet, they were greeted by Adalene, rushing towards
the elves with a letter in her hand. She would never get to read it out. Without hesitation,
Siona ordered her men to order fire, and Adalene was instantly riddled with arrows and killed.
Her screams roused some of the village folk, who grabbed their pitchforks and charged the elves,
but they were no match and were cut down as well. As more humans poured out of their homes, Siona
and her crew became outnumbered and were forced to retreat. Only then did Elandrin emerge to be
met with the corpse of the woman he loved. Even in death, he refused to leave his lover’s side.
To the vengeful humans, it made no difference: a pointed ear was a pointed ear, and Elandrin was
butchered in revenge for his sister’s atrocities. The letter in Adalane’s clutches, written by his
hand, forever going unread. Adalene,
What care have I for gods I have never seen, for a Maker I do not know? Let others distract
themselves with such lofty concerns. I know only this life, I have seen only this world,
and I care only for you. Perhaps your priestess distrusts the sincerity of "uncivilized" elves.
If she must hear me say I will follow the Maker, so be it. Your god intercedes as much as ours.
My life will not change. I will return in two weeks' time. My heart longs for you 'til then,
and will remain with you forever after. Elandrin
After the massacre at Red Crossing, the Empire or Orlais declared war on the Kingdom of the Dales,
and the contest for the fate of the Elvhen began. The Elves struck fast and struck hard,
storming out of their forests astride their war-halla and blitzing into Orlesian land.
In 2:10 Glory, the Emerald Knight Vaharel fell upon the city of Montsimmard and captured it in
a lightning strike. As the Elves continued to storm through eastern Orlais and maraud ever
closer to the capital of Val Royeaux, panic spread throughout the Empire. In response, Divine Renata
I of the Chantry declared an Exalted March, a holy war, inviting all the Andrastian nations to take
up arms against the heathen elves. However, none of the other human nations provided their troops,
leaving Orlais to handle their own affairs. By the end of 2:14 Glory, Elven armies had reached
Val Royeaux, subjecting the city to a brutal sack and plundering the sacred tomb of Emperor
Kordillius Drakon I, taking his arms and armour back to Halamshiral to be displayed as trophies.
This was a crippling blow to the great Andrastian Empire, but it was not its end. Orlais was a huge
country with vast reserves of manpower and resources to call upon, manpower which their
opponents simply could not match. Indeed, although the Dalish had almost every battle thus far,
every Elven life lost in those engagements was felt sorely, while for every Orlesian soldier
cut down, there were three more peasants in the countryside ready to be conscripted.
By using attrition to their advantage, the Orlesian armies were eventually able
to regroup and turn the tide. Eventually, they liberated Val Royeaux and began pushing eastwards,
pushing the Elvhen out of Orlais before advancing into the Dales. The Emerald Knights made the
Andrastians pay a quart in blood for every inch they advanced into the Elvish forests,
but they could not stop the human advance. By 2:20, Glory Orlesian and Chantry banners
were flying before the walls of Halamshiral, and soon after, the Elven Capital fell.
Even after this, the Dalish refused to surrender. The last holdouts of the Elvish army led by the
Emerald Knight-Captain Lindiranae retreated to a place called Dirthavaren to make a final stand.
Here, they faced down an Orlesian army led by the Warrior-Priestess Amity, champion of the Chantry.
The Elves were cut down to the last man and woman, Lindiranae was slain, and with her death,
so too did the dream of Elven Freedom die once more. At the conclusion of the Exalted March,
the Dalish kingdom was dismantled, and its lands were annexed by the Empire of Orlais,
which established human settlements across the former Elven domain. The shrines to
the elven gods were struck down throughout the Dales, and the Chant of Light was sung.
The faithful rejoiced, for the word of the Maker, had finally reached this corner of the earth,
and thus He was one step closer to returning. As for the Elves themselves, whose fate now lay
in the hands of the Chantry, sister Amity had this to say: “Even Maferath the Betrayer had
a part to play. Who are we to say the elves do not? The Elves were guilty of the greatest sin,
of turning from the Maker. But we will show them mercy, for that is what Andraste teaches.”
For the heirs of Arlathan, this “mercy” was a bitter pill to swallow.
They were subject to mass deportation, forced to disperse throughout the land and live in squalid,
walled-off sections of human cities called ‘Alienages,’ where they were treated like
second-class citizens. Moreover, they were forced to fully assimilate into
human society by abandoning their old Gods and converting to Andrastianism,
undoing all the work the Dalish Kingdom had done to revive the ancient knowledge of Elvhenan and
condemning the Elvish language, culture and religion to a slow and pitiful extinction.
The Elves would not be enslaved people, as they had when their first homeland fell to the Tevinter
Imperium, but they became a ghettoized people all the same. Some, however, refused this fate.
Rather than submitting to Andrastian “mercy,” they banded together into nomadic clans and committed
to roaming the continent as a homeless, stateless people. These itinerant wandering tribes,
known as the Dalish Clans for their second lost homeland, would continue to reject the human God.
It would be in them that the last vestiges of Elven religion and language lived on.
Life among the nomadic Dalish was tough, and they were reviled as a pariah people in most lands,
but they survived nonetheless and continue to roam throughout Thedas to this day.
With Elven independence vanquished for the last time and the Dwarven Kingdoms content
to remain deep under the earth, fighting a perpetual battle with the Darkspawn,
the Chantry believed there would be no more obstacles in their objective of spreading the
Chant of Light to all four corners of the earth. They would be wrong. In our next episode on the
history of the world of Dragon Age, a new player will enter the fold as the massive, ashen-kinned,
horned Qunari arrive upon Thedosian shores with a strictly conformist religion of their own,
which they intend to spread by spear and sword. To make sure you don’t miss that, make sure you
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