The Blanketfort (crying and throwing up) - The Official Solas Thread [Spoilers]

This isn't exactly what he said - never mind that at no point "mirroring the thoughts of living" was connected to dialogue mentioning anything about "ultimate truth" (in fact he did describe them as true and they are indeed true - as in, true emotional states and thoughts or experiences of those the Fade has mirrored). I myself only remember that he said (in different context) that there are 'few hard facts' - so, while there may be a few of those, it appears that there are still some.

Also - Solas's position is definitely not that one can't extract truth/facts (if not about the Fade then about the world it reflects), but the actual opposite throughout the entirety of DAI   

He even tells us how to do it: in order to extract truth from the Fade one has to approach it like history from books and sources that aren't necessarily objective. So he's using an entirely familiar and well-established scholarly approach that people can use with success to establish a more or less accurate picture from otherwise limited or biased sources about the past - and it does appear to be useful in the Fade as well.

... I mean, never mind that Solas doesn't base his information just on scraps he finds in the Fade

The devs have said on multiple occasions that Solas removed the Inquisitor's arm. Here is the most recent ask that I'm aware of, from April 2019:

ebrietas, daughter of the cosmos || ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ @arlathansgrace
@patrickweekes @eplerjc @biomarykirby someone, ANYONE, DID SOLAS RIP YOUR ARM OFF OR DID HE JUST LEAVE I do NOT know why I keep seeing people say he did it when that did NOT happen in my Tres. ending cutscene hhhhnnngnh

John Epler @eplerjc
Solas took your arm. Due to technical limitations with the engine, we couldn't make it as obvious as we wanted to, but yes - the only way to save you from the Mark was for him to take it.

ebrietas, daughter of the cosmos || ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ @arlathansgrace
First of all, thank you, I did not expect a Proper Person(TM) to see let alone to respond to my yelling. But, second of all:how DARE you. I just felt my BLOOD run COLD.

John Epler @eplerjc
Solas is a firm believer that the end justifies the means. You needed to survive, and he only had one real way to ensure that you did.

Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes
I mean, he didn’t necessarily rip it off physically. I assumed that given what the mark was doing by then, you might not have had a lot of “arm” left to lose.

(As much as I love the idea of Solas walking around with the Inquisitor’s hand.)

John Epler @eplerjc
Yeah. While we never got into the specifics of it, in my mind he just collapsed the Fade energy that had started to poison your arm - and that meant taking that part of your arm away.

Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes
Yeah. I mean, it’s green. Green is the international gaming symbol for poison.
Deep narrative talks courtesy of Epler and Weekes, errybody.

🐉 emily @ tma 🐉 @turbogandalf
so kind of like, it just sort of withers or falls off like a dead leaf? or did the magic he used sever it?

John Epler @eplerjc
Closer to disintegrated, I think. You can see it sort of dripping (melting into energy) by the end.

I imagine mine told them Solas removed it, along with everything she'd just learned from Solas. She would have been in shock after all that. She had Dorian, Cassandra, and Cole in her party just before the final encounter with Solas, so they know everything.

Since we're discussing missing parts of someone... I keep wondering what Cole meant when he spoke his cryptic '99.999%-certain-to-be-about-Solas' banter in Trespasser.

You know, that one: "He broke the dreams to stop the old dreams from waking. The wolf chews its leg off to escape the trap."

IMO the banter suggests something more substantive than metaphorically losing part of oneself, as in (relevant to his past, for sure) Solas's banter with Cassandra after her personal quest: "Now that you know them corrupt, you must determine which parts of yourself to discard and which to keep".

I don't necessarily think that the above has to exclude other possibilities or that these things may not have happened simultaneously. And that's aside from the possibility that there may have been less distinction between literal and figurative stuff in a Veilless world - but Solas having to sacrifice some sort of substantial part of himself to pull off a stunt as big as dealing with multiple power-crazy Evanuris and cloaking the world with the Veil would make sense.

Such a thing would also help explain Solas's diminished state (also, that little cryptic comment pretty straightforwardly tells us how Solas has managed to escape the fate of other Evanuris) aside from all the exertion that must've happened + all the millennia of slumber.

What I wonder about is whether a portion of our dealing with Solas would perhaps be looking for/finding that missing part? Or perhaps it's a part that is corrupted beyond repair and we may have to prevent him from re-joining with it?

When my Inquisitor sentenced Florianne to do manual labor, Solas disapproved. I have no idea shy.

I suspect because it wasn’t very clever use of Florianne’s talents or connections (Solas greatly approves making her work for us), nor I think manual labor is a punishment that will stick with anyone as meaningful.

That... does look better than my quick, stream-of-consciousness drafts... or even some more deliberate drafts 

That sounds about right.

Really interested n what Briala is up to. Because by Trespasser, Solas all but says he usurped Briala's control of the main eluvian network. Which means that unless she allied with him (which is a possibility) her elven network just lost its greatest trump card. Fast travel times aside, the eluvian network also doubled as the backbone to a secure communications network and likely as a means of providing secure temporary safehouses for her operations. So it's easy to believe that Briala's resistance relied heavily on it.

Briala basically only used her network for spy ops right? This talk just reminds me of how id have loved to have val royeaux and halamshiral proper as locales to visit, so we could get an actual plotline related to the alienages and see briala use her network to actually do something besides gather intel like some faux bard or orlesian noble. Ultimately, her network seems to have not really done much as it stands.

Does anyone else here see an (unintentional) parallel between Solavellan and Ameridan/Telana?

I'm sort of 50%-50% on this. I think it may have been one of those things that they've noticed when they were hashing out the details - then they just ran with it and maybe added some finishing touches while going 'hehehehe' in the process, lol.