If you have not played “Dragon Age: Origins”, seek it out. You may be surprised how good it is. How moving it is.
If you have not played the game all the way through beware that the following will spoil the game for you.
If you have not played the game at all, the letter will make little sense to you.
My Dearest Morrigan,
How I wish I could see your face as you read in an ancient elvish tongue your own name on a letter sent to a high chantry official in Orlais. Yes, I am aware that you have been reading my correspondence, and since Grand Cleric Sameux has often expressed an almost perverse interest in hearing about the beautiful young witch – his word and not mine – that accompanied me through my adventures, I feel certain that you will be completely unable to resist intercepting this particular letter on it’s way to Orlais for fear that I may say something wicked about you.
On a side note, imagine poor Sameux’s face when he receives this now second hand letter from his friend in Ferelden that neither he nor even his most wise adviser can actually read. The favors I have had to call in to create this translation of my original words into the most obscure language possible would astonish even you. I have grown quite powerful in my own way. And you are not the only one who has made friends in strange and wondrous places. But I trust you will have little difficulty obtaining and studying the rarest of tomes necessary to unlock the mysteries on these pages, and soon read them as though they were in your own handwriting.
To answer some questions you may have desired to ask me yourself if you could – or more to the point could ask if you had the courage to see me – I will say; Yes, I have been busy. Yes, Allistair is still shocked to wake a King each morning. And yes, he has grown more clever by some small measure in my mind. I always felt you gave him too little credit for his ability to joust with you when it came to wit. Though to be fair his wit does seem to come almost from another age – either long past or one still to come.
And finally; Yes, I do miss you.
Late at night, when nothing stirs in the underbrush outside my tent, or all of the palace servents have gone to bed – sometimes when I tiredly wipe the blood of monstrosities or petty tyrants from my sword, or when I clean the mud from the Alienage left on my boots as I seek to make things better for my people; it is then – when I lay down to sleep, but sleep has not yet come – that I wish most to hear your voice, to see some small part of your face in a shaft of moonlight or even just hear your breath rising and falling beside me.
Yes, there have been others. Allistair likes to joke that the fairer sex sees the pain in my eyes and seek to comfort me like a lost puppy found on a rainy back road. But I know that is only partly true. He sees that far away look in my eyes more than anyone else. Allistair, who is now like a brother to me, knows. And so, though I have needs, I indulge them far less frequently than you probably imagine. And no woman has stayed for long – driven off by the shadow of someone who’s name they may have heard whispered by court gossips or heard in some far-off village legend. Allistair suspects your hand in this – some ancient spell he imagines and often conjectures on when we are alone together and the wine is flowing. But, as I have told him, I do not believe that you would do such a thing, nor would I care if you actually did.
Though I’m sure you have great knowledge of the things that come under your powerful gaze, the world may still hold surprises for you if only you were here to see them. For example, your part in the freeing of this land has not been forgotten. I have even heard some have taken to naming newborn girls Morrigan, in your honor. Once, on the docks of Val Royeaux I heard your name called out and turned to see a mother, crouching with her arms thrown wide to embrace an excited young girl with long dark hair who ran to embrace a mother she had obviously been too long separated from. I turned my face away from my companions, pretending to seek out some nearby landmark of the city in hopes that they would not see me shut my eyes against tears.
But I did not go to all of this trouble to tell you of my work and struggles, but to tell you of yours.
Yes, I am aware of the subtle changes in the workings of the world that have been made in your name or by your hand. I know many now with no small knowledge of very old ways, and who know how to speak quietly where not even an insect could overhear. I know those who could mask my every move so that even your mother would have difficulty perceiving. But I use their services far less often than a probably should. Truth be told; I’ve nothing to hide from you. But you have things to hide from me. Just be aware than not all of them are as successfully hidden as you might think, and that I am not fool enough to believe that everything I uncover is real. It is a game between us I find most interesting. Just be careful because I play it better than you know.
But I did not do all this to remind you of who I am and what I am capable of. I go to great effort now to speak to you as I once did a long time ago, and to urge you to think of your actions in light of your time with me.
Morrigan, I want you to understand more than anything that I did what I did on the eve of the battle not out of lust, fear or even romantic love, but out of trust. I trusted you because you know my distaste for the ugliness that many men call civilized society. You knew of my mistrust of the legends of the Urn of Sacred Ashes, and of Andraste herself – of the Chantries and the Templars and any number of things I have seen in this world. But often you scoffed at my refusal to rebel outright or spit in the faces of well meaning and humble folk who do believe in these institutions. And it is the cruelty, inherited from your mother’s upbringing, that has caused me to second guess my decision of that night more than any other factor of reason or societal norms.
My decision that night was based on trust, but not foolish trust. I pray that you do not make the mistake of believing that you tricked me in some manner, or that in a prideful moment you think you lured some fool to do your bidding. When next you think to take pride in whatever you have created, be sure to remember that it could not have been created without me. That is not to say that I take some great pride in a physical act any man can perform, but that you needed me. You not only needed me to agree to your plan. More importantly, you needed me not to oppose it. For if I had, I would have ensured it’s failure. In the end it was my hand that drove the blade into the Archdemon’s skull, and I who created the means to survive it. Whatever Age you hope to give birth to, if you are it’s mother, then I am it’s father
As such, I speak now not as an angry or bitter parent, but as a loving one. I joined with you because we share a comman belief that this world we live in is tainted, and that the source of that taint is not some monstrous outside force, but a powerful concentration or reflection of our own flaws.We both know that somet hings very old and pure have been tainted and lost in the crush of centuries, and under the boots of empires.
Though at first I was startled at your plan I realized that you spoke to a part of me that saw things as you did, and I can remember taking a certain perverse joy in the roar of the crowds who cheered us as we left for battle. They had no idea that on that day I meant to not only put my sword deep into the Archdemon himself, but deep into the heart of mankind’s own pride and destructiveness. I, like you, wanted to strike at the heart of hypocrisy, intolerance, bigotry and injustice. You may think I speak in hyperbole, and that I am mistaken in my assessment of your intent, but I promise you I am not.
I know you better than you know yourself. How else could I love you despite all of the ugliness and bitterness your mother placed in you. I have used that word before; bitterness. For it is perhaps the single best word to describe that which I hated most in your mother, and that which I hate most to see in you. Whatever your mother had once been when she was more human, when I met her she was all bitterness, selfishness and malice. There is not one act of hers I am aware of not driven by those emotions.
As a side note, just as I am aware of your eyes watching me, so too am I aware of hers. I have no doubt that she can find a way to read this letter if she wishes. She may have watched it being written for all I know. She is free to come and speak to me about my beliefs on her at any time. But she should be know that I am unafraid of anything she might do to me, and that if she is wise she might be just a tiny bit afraid of what I may be now be capable of doing to her. We all have friends in high places now it seems. Perhaps I should thank your mother for teaching me the wisdom of seeking them out.
And so, more than anything personal I wish you to know of my feelings towards you as a woman and as a friend, I wish you to know this; remember the lessons you learned in your time with me. Often you made sport of my compassion and my willingness to help others when more important matters always seemed to be pressing. I remember you would be driven to near outrage at my choices when faced with a moral crisis. To you it seemed there were no moral crisis. Your philosophy was to take what you will and do as you will regardless of the cost to others.
Though I will not pretend that all my choices were clear and free of my own personal prejudices, or that they were all correct – even from the perspective of pure practicality – I tried always to err on the side of compassion and love rather than raw power. The power that your mother so proudly wielded , and probably still wields though I destroyed her, was tainted by a heart full of poison and the deafening roar of an endless rushing river of bitterness that she tried to pass on to you.
I ask you now, as someone who loves you as no one else ever has before to consider how my love has strengthened this land. A land, I hasten to add, I had no reason to love, and every reason to hate. Though I spoke little of the Alienage, you know the story that brought me to the Gray Wardens well enough. You know the story of my thwarted wedding day. I learned on that day to turn my hate into power. But I used that power to destroy injustice and make my darker thoughts and feelings useful to the world.
Did you think when I sought to free those enslaved – either literally by chains or figuratively by their own madness, their society or their own lust for power – that I was an utter, blind fool? If you did, then you mother never needed to take over your body to be immortal. She lives in your every thought, and that is crueler and more subtle magic than anything she may have put in a grimore to temp you to act against her. I suspect there is far more between her and you than you imagine, and that if you are not careful, your simultaneous hatred of her and love of her beliefs will create a dichotomy in you so powerful that she will have a doorway into your soul that no magic can hide and no spell of hers could create. And that may be exactly as she planned.
I may well be wrong, and often meditate on the idea that Flemeth knows more than I can imagine. Not just that she is more knowledgeable, but that her mind is open to realities I cannot begin to grasp. I do not blame Flemeth entirely. She is a lost soul. A woman who sought power as an ultimate good, and lost her humanity because of it. I would have gladly accepted the dark soul of the beast I destroyed in that final battle to save our land and allowed it to mingle with and even annihilate my own soul if it had meant saving yours.
I pray that what I once considered in an odd moment – that you are your mother, quite literally, going around and around in an endless circle of birth and destruction – is not at all true. It would fit with what I know of the beliefs you were raised on, and would fit with the ironies that sometimes seem necessary to the practice of what Flemeth would no doubt call True and Old Magic. But that thought is too dark and too sad to consider for long.
I once told you that love is not a weakness, and it is true. Love is the basis of compassion, but both love and compassion flow from the passionate human emotions we feel. We are more powerful because we can confront and live with that force within us. We can understand it, rather than beat it down, and harness it to do things that your mother could never do. Powerful creatures like your mother lose something in gaining their power. They lose their humanity.
And if nothing I have said has convinced you to consider carefully what you do, think on this; if you lash out, you will be to lashing out at your mother. She is already in you whether you know it or not, and she cannot be dispelled by any magic, no matter how powerful. Though I did not fully understand it at the time, I believe that is why we met. That is why we joined our hearts in true friendship, and that is why we loved – and still love one another. Because I was meant to teach you that not all power is based in strength, and not all love is based in weakness.
Before I finish this letter to you, I need not remind you that I love you, but also will I be watching you. And that for the sake of all living beings I am unafraid to destroy that which I love.
But I will also say again that I would sooner risk or incur my own destruction to save you or teach you. I live each day in the hope that you will not lose that precious thing you possess that some would call a soul. Whatever you may call it, it is that which I love most. And I beg you – be careful what you do with it.
Always,
Your Gray Warden
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