Dragon Age: What Is The Veil?

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• What Is The Veil?

• How Can People Still Enter The Fade?

• Why Was The Veil Created?

Dragon Age, though in many regards pulling many of its more foundational ideas from other fantasy works, has quite a few unique aspects of its own. Much of this comes in the form of the Fade, a realm of spirits and magic, albeit one that is separated from the world of the living.

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This comes in the form of something called the Veil. The Veil is an admittedly vague concept, one that is both a literal separating barrier and also charged with a frankly absurd degree of religious tension. Many claim an origin to the Veil, yet so few can claim to prove it. So let's break it down and figure out exactly what it is.

What Is The Veil?

In Dragon Age, two primary realms exist - the realm of spirits, and the realm of the living. These are the Fade and Thedas respectively. The games take place almost exclusively within Thedas, with brief excursions into the Fade. To those in Thedas, the Fade is filled with demons who want nothing more than to enter into the world of the living and possess and kill anyone they encounter.

The Crossroads accessed by the Eluvians is technically another realm of its own, a mini reality formed from the Fade, though with no direct access to other realms than through Eluvians.

This is where the Veil comes in. It separates the Fade from Thedas so that neither spirits nor living beings can intrude upon the other. This has been the case for what would seem to be the entirety of recorded history, though some oddities crop up at times.

The very existence of magic is said to come from the Fade, yet it manifests in certain individuals within Thedas as well. On the flip side, spirits and demons are said to be without imagination yet yearn for a body to allow them to interact with the world more tangibly. The two realms seem inextricably drawn to each other despite being cut off by the Veil.

How Can People Still Enter The Fade?

Despite separation by the Veil, the Fade and Thedas attract each other in numerous ways to the point that beings from both realms end up appearing in the other constantly. Yet the Veil's entire point is to keep them apart, so how is this even possible in the first place?

It happens in numerous ways. For the denizens of Thedas (Dwarves excluded), they enter the Fade in a spiritual form while dreaming. For the majority of individuals, this is not even a perceived phenomenon but simply a dream. Though rare, it is possible for demonic possession to occur during dreaming. For Mages, the Fade may be entered intentionally in what can be seen as akin to lucid dreaming.

The Chantry, the largest religious institution of Thedas, claims that dwarves are not created by The Maker, a means of explaining why they do not dream or use magic.

This movement, of living beings entering the Fade in dreams and spirits entering the world of the living through communication with the beings of Thedas, seems to indicate that the Veil is thin indeed. It is not purely physical, it cannot be traversed by simply finding the boundary and going through it, yet it also seems that something has unequivocally separated these two worlds that yearn to be connected.

Why Was The Veil Created?

This is a question that is strongly debated within the lore of Dragon Age, though perhaps debated is the wrong word. Each group claims their own reality of the matter, fully denouncing that of others. The two groups with the most formulated reasoning for the Veil's existence are the Dalish Elves and the Chantry.

The Chantry's Version Of The Veil

The Chantry has a grand origin tale for existence. The Maker was the first being, and He created the Fade so as to share in His divinity. This was His first world. It was filled with spirits with immense power such as that to create as He could, yet they lacked imagination. They could not replicate, not create anything as He could. The Maker was dismayed, and so He abandoned this first world as a failure.

Next, He made Thedas and filled it with the many living beings that now dwell across its surface. To keep His worlds separate, he created the Veil. He could not destroy His first world, but He could at least keep His two creations apart. Humanity pleased Him. They did not have the same power of creation as His first world, but they had imagination. They could create by means of their own even without divine power. They only needed the love of their Maker.

Yet The Maker's creations were defiled. Spirits of the Fade whispered through the Veil in the dreams of Humans, and the gift of imagination gave birth to the curse of avarice. They wished to traverse the Veil and seek the true power of their god. This was the original sin, and when He first turned his back on all of His creations. The Veil would remain to keep them apart until Humanity could once again find the means to truly show reverence to their original Maker.

The Chantry posits that demons exist due to spirits' jealousy of the Maker's new world and the Veil stopping them from interacting with each other.

The Dalish Elves' Version Of The Veil

The Dalish claim to have once been a grand civilization, the greatest and most grand in all of Thedas. Over generations, they were crushed and enslaved by various forces such as the Tevinter Imperium and the Exalted Marches of the Chantry. As such, much of their own history remains purely in relics they barely comprehend themselves and oral tales based down over generations.

The Dalish had their own Pantheon of gods, the Evanuris. They fought at times with the Forgotten gods and the morally portrayed Dread Wolf, Fen'Harel. Elven belief holds Fen'Harel in scorn for his battles with the benevolent Evanuris, though the Dread Wolf himself holds another version of the tale.

The Evanuris were tyrannical gods and killed one of their own, Mythal, for daring to contest their rule. Fen'harel took great fury at this, and sought to punish these gods not just in a fit of rage for killing his own true friend but to free other Elves from their reign. To this end, he erected the Veil, removing magic from the world alongside the Evanuris and trapping them all in the newly created Fade.

The later creation of the Veil, rather than the Fade and Thedas always being separate, would explain why things like Lyrium exist in both realms.

As a consequence of this severance, the great Elven civilizations collapsed. They were formed on magic, and could no longer do so without its touch. Though Fen'harel sought to grant them freedom, the creation of the Veil instead doomed them to death and obscurity by another means and even caused the very Elves he aimed to save to curse his name.

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