There’s Practically a Book Here…

A copy of the binding

I recently played Dragon Age: Origins, and I’m still boggled by the amount of writing within the game detailing history, culture, and interesting little stories.   The codices are pretty much a book unto themselves.   One of my favorite things about the game is the little scraps of stories that are easily missed, one of these being the Black Vials.  In old ruins, one occasionally stumbles over an odd vial containing swirling liquid and emanating a bone-chilling cold.  Once touched, the vial breaks, and a bound revenant is released.

What’s left after fighting it is a scrap of paper with a binding written on it, confining the undead by their true name, followed by thumbprints of the binders, in blood.  Each of these bindings holds little hints of the story behind it.  The Sixth is my favorite, because of the small, child-sized thumb print it included.  Was the child the one to recognize the signs of an undead?  Did it discover the corpse walker’s true name, making the binding possible?  One can piece together an untold tale here about a brave little boy or girl.

Tiffany and I have made the vial, complete with binding (a copy within the vial and outside).  Tiffany has a lovely writeup and more photos of the project over at Curious Goods, as well as a video of the revenant swirling around in the bottle.