bittergossamer

[bittergossamer]

wax seal pngs :)  like/reblog if you use plz

#graphics

[bittergossamer]

the thing i love about the hawke family is that it's entirely a reflection of hawke. hawke is shaped by the family, in the sense that all people are shaped by where and how they grow up, and the family is shaped by hawke in turn, because you create the family by your choices.

carver is your surviving sibling because you chose to be a mage, but carver is also carver because his siblings were both mages. i'm not here to tell anyone what to think, if you think carver would have been the same person regardless, that's totally fine, but i think the carver who grew up with an "ally", a non-mage sibling who was like him is a fundamentally different person than the carver who grew up having to protect two mages.

similarly, the bethany who grew up with self-loathing isolation... i think that's a different person than a bethany who grew up with a mage sibling, particularly if that sibling felt differently about their magic. that's a bethany who couldn't blame only herself for the family's situation, who wasn't always the odd one out, the one with the biggest and worst secret.

i love that the narrative bends around hawke, creates an arc where the defining feature of the surviving sibling is isolation. loneliness.

malcolm is the ghost in the machine the haunting at the center of the narrative, yes, but he is also shaped in your image. hawke is canonically like malcolm, which means that malcolm is canonically like hawke. leandra, who loved him, who gave up everything for him, then changes too, maybe more subtly. but who hawke is has to reflect on who leandra is, because leandra becomes the type of person who would anchor her life around a person like hawke.

#da2

[bittergossamer]

cipher talk: vallaslin

In Dragon Age Origins, Vallaslin is introduced as the facial tattoos of Dalish elves and translated as "Blood writing". The question I have is which part of this word means "blood" and which part means "writing"? vallas or lin? 

Theory 1:

Before they settled on what was in the cipher, they used both parts of this word in both ways which muddled things. So you get lin → len in a kind of "blood/kinship" way and vallas in a kind of "blood/life" way.

Theory 2:

Vallaslin means "my blood", vallas means "blood" and lin means "my (possessive)".

We know that these were slave markings. There might have been blood magic. I think there's some cases of how the Evanuris saw slaves/people with their vallaslin as extensions of themselves. Here's some other words that led to this theory:

1] Elgara vallas refers to a setting sun, which turns bright red on the horizon. So maybe this phrase literally means "sun bleeds".

2] Vallasdahlen is literally translated as "life trees".

dahlen: "tree", but probably "woods/forest". (see: Vir Adahlen). vallas: logically, this probably means "life", which has a loose connection to "blood".

3] da'durgen'lin means "my little stones".

da: "little", often as a prefix (e.g. da'len: little child). durgen: "stone" lin: as the untranslated part of this phrase, "my".

Some additional parts to this is that da'durgen'len is translated as "little dwarves", (durgen'len is literally "children of the stone"). It's posited in that codex that lin became len which could also be possessive in the sense of "children belong to their parents".

The issue with the second theory is really that I just have more clear examples of vallas meaning "blood" than lin meaning anything. Here's a bunch of words that have lin as a syllable and I don't know if they're related:

Arulin'Holm - An ancient elvhen tool used for woodcutting that is an old as Arlathan. Used by Merrill to repair the eluvian.

amelin - From something Solas says to Abelas, "Malas amelin ne halam, Abelas." 

lethallin - "friend", but also "lin" in this word is the one gendered ending in the entire language. Maybe a kind of "my love (platonic)" sort of way.

Halin'sulahn - The golden halla. "Sulhan" means joy, I have no idea about "halin". 

sahlin - "come", but in the sense that death is here. 

There's a couple other words that might also be related to vallas, which are Dhal Vallasan (a unique bow wielded by the Emerald Knights) and vallem (from a line of dialogue said by a spirit in Trespasser) but these also don't have enough context for me to guess.

Last instance of this word is bana'vallaslin from Where Willows Wail. The bit that probably corresponds to that is "failing of our markings", so this is probably the cultural idea of vallaslin. In this text, vallaslin might not refer to the markings but instead the people who wore those markings.

#dragon age #dragon age elves #elvhen #elvhen cipher #dai spoilers #slavery mention #having a nightmare time formatting this as 'readable' #dai #da:i #da:i spoilers

[bittergossamer]

hey! I was wondering if you were still working on the Elvhen cipher? I was actually just thinking about doing something similar recently when I stumbled upon your work, so I wanted to ask :)

I had a couple days where I was really stressed this week so I rebuilt the whole thing but in the future, yeah, feel free to build whatever you want from the Elvhen Cipher/remake the project if I disappear again and it falls out of date, etc.

If you want to build something similar for a different media property and want to use my code, I ask that you link back to me/credit, but that's it.

#elvhen cipher

[bittergossamer]

potentially some things to add to your elvhen cipher: Dar'Hall'n and Hanal'ghilan

Can't find a source of Dar'Hall'n outside of maybe it being from the fan supplements for the TTRPG (Esoterica from Thedas), which is really not a canon source. (The Green Ronin TTRPG is here but on thin ice.)

Hanal'ghilan I did miss, thank you.

#elvhen cipher

[bittergossamer]

I've been need of a good place with the full elvhen dictionary so thank you! I've just begun looking through it and saw "Amin" is unknown. Considering Hamin means rest, and "Amin" came from a lullaby from Denerim, I'd say it's resonable to assume it's variant of Hamin

I'll make a note of that. The passage amin comes from, though, is:

Ir tela'ena glandival, vir amin tel'hanin. When we could no longer believe, we lost glory to war.

tel'hanin probably means "glory", vir usually means "path" or "way" and "rest" doesn't quite make sense for this passage.

#elvhen cipher

[bittergossamer]

Clan Boranehn from Knight Errant translation

Because this makes everything even a little more sadder (literally)

Bora = Lost* Nehn = Joy

So their clan is literally called Lost Joy. The sadness clan.

*The phrase ”Lathbora viran” translates to "The path to a place of lost love.“ Picking that a part: vir which we know is path, -an which we know is a suffix meaning place, lath which we know is love, meaning bora must mean lost.

#sourcing elvhen #elvhen cipher

[bittergossamer]

Elvhen Excerpts in DAI Codex Entries

from On Skyhold

Var'landivalis him sa'bellanaris san elgar Melanada him sa'miras fena'taldin (word missing) Nadasalin telrevas ne suli telsethenera Tarasyl'an te'las vehn'ir abelath'vir (word missing)

Our belief transformed into everything. (assertation/problem? uncertain) All time is transformed into the final/first death (uncertain), Inevitable/threatened victory and horrible/promised freedom in the untorn veils, (uncertain) Where the sky is held up/back, where the people give/gain love that is an apology/promise from/to….(missing subject, uncertain)

from Torn Notebook in the Deep Roads, Section 3

Ir sa tel'nal, Mythal las ma theneras. Ir san'a emma. Him solas evanuris. Da'durgen'lin, Banal malas elgara. Bellanaris, bellanaris.

I am empty, filled with nothing(?), Mythal gives you dreams. It fills you, within you(?), Making our leaders proud. My little stones, Never yours the sun. Forever, forever.

Hahren said we had lost some of the old words. What if they have changed? Durgen'lin from durgen'len? Little dwarves, never yours the sun? What did Mythal do here?

from Tracing from Temple Doors

Emma solas him var din'an. Tel garas solasan. Melana en athim las enaste.

Arrogance became our end. Come not to a prideful place. Now let humility grant favor.

#reference #sourcing elvhen

[bittergossamer]

I don't think we discuss often enough that if you're playing a dwarf warden when you meet Justice he's like "hey I don't mean to be rude but like, what are you? I've literally never seen anything like you before and it's kind of weirding me out"

#dao #dao:a #justice #sigrun #oghren

[bittergossamer]

Zev but with dark hair

#zevran arainai #dao

[bittergossamer]

Love how Sten's all "you are my comrade and I respect you. When my people inevitably invade your land I will not look for you on the battlefield" and when you ask him to please elaborate on that invasion thing he's like, don't worry about it.

#sten #dao

[bittergossamer]

Following my yearly October tradition of drawing bog wife 🥰

(Also bioware should’ve given us proper Chasind Morrigan )

Instagram | Buy me a Coffee

#morrigan

[bittergossamer]

The assassin you sent after me is part of my found family now

#zevran #dragon age origins

[bittergossamer]

My redesign of the female dwarf concept from Dragon Age 2. Made her as a response to this post, but felt that she deserved her own.

#dwarves #da2

[bittergossamer]

in truth, for the chance to be by your side I would storm the Dark City itself.

#zevran #goddamn these colors

[bittergossamer]

your elven cipher isn't working :''( it just says "something fucked" any time i try to access it. is everything okay?

Yeah, I took a break from working on it, and while I have no clue what went wrong, I’ll try to figure that out. It might be a tumblr thing where I just have to move where I’m hosting it.

#project updates #elvhen cipher #Anonymous

[bittergossamer]

A commission for @sapphim, who wanted Zevran with a varterral-like Dirthamen vallaslin design, the idea being he reconnects with his Dalish heritage after the Blight and eventually receives it. 🙂 Thank you so much again, loved working on this one!

#zevran #da2