The Veilguard Probably Has Terrifying Darkspawn Mutants, And A Lore Buff May Have Found Out Why

This article contains spoilers for the beginning of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and also the ‘Horror of Hormak’ short story in Tevinter Nights.

A comprehensive article from Game Informer detailed the events of Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s prologue. Naturally, this has prompted fans to begin speculating about the various narrative implications of this new information.

In the prologue, the ‘Dread Wolf’ Solas attempts to transfer the ancient Elven gods Ghilan’nain and Elgar’nan from their faltering ancient prison to a new one. However, he is interrupted by our well-meaning party who believe he is trying to tear down the Veil simply to restore the Old World. This unintentionally frees the ancient pair, neatly setting up worthy protagonists for our Veilguard.

Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, are both plenty terrifying, but one aspect of the latter is potentially nightmare fuel. Note that Gilan’nain is identified as female, the Dalish refer to her as the Mother of the Halla. In my piece about the Dwarves of Kal’Sharok, I mentioned one of the short stories from the Teviner Nights anthology, The Horror of Hormak.

The Horrors Of The Deep

To summarise a compelling story, a pair of Grey Wardens track a lost part of wardens to an old thaig, Hormak. Inside they find mutated Darkspawn, like Shrieks with spider legs, or a giant centipede creature with one of the wardens attached to it. The centipede warden regains his mind for long enough to tell the two wardens that they must destroy a lyrium pool to keep it away from “her.”

Ultimately, one of the wardens sacrifices herself to bring the roof down on the mutant darkspawn. The fleeing warden then detonates charges at the entrance for good measure. Now, who is the ‘her’ referring to? Well, content creator and Dragon Age lore buff greenbrownblue (BubbbleCheeeks on Reddit) has posited a theory.

An inscription in Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Temple of Mythal describes how Ghilan’nain created monsters to hunt before Andruil offered her godhood. The Horror of Hormak could have been a tease for Ghilan’nain leading a new, horrific army of Darkspawn mutants. These could serve as the ground forces of the Elven goddess, though we don’t know her exact motivations yet.

I hope the rumoured arachnophobia mode is in the game because I don’t know if I can stomach fighting an eight-legged Hurlock chittering at me.

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