I’d heard reports that there were soldiers trapped in a fortress in the Exalted Plains. We left Skyhold and journeyed there at once. Undead and demons were running amok in the vicinity. Cassandra, Solas, and Dorian did an admirable job of helping mop up the mess.
Someone, however, had activated the tower defenses, which while they kept the undead at bay, they kept anyone else from relieving the forces trapped inside. When we finally made our way to the tower, I discovered from the commander that they did not know how to shut down the defenses. So I ran up the steps and found a switch and pulled it. Amazingly it shut it off. Someone needs to provide these soldiers with proper training. This isn’t magic.
Solas mentioned that a spirit friend of his was near, and had been trapped and corrupted by some mages. He wanted us to release the spirit. All I saw was a demon bound by wards. Cassandra was skeptical about Solas’ desire to release the demon. Solas explained that it was a spirit of wisdom and that he knew it, and I saw his distress over the matter. The mages were afraid, and Solas was very angry with them. But the mages summoned the spirit to protect them from bandits. They did not understand. I reluctantly agreed to try Solas’ solution and destroy the wards. The demon was released and returned to its spirit form. Solas spoke to it before it died. I now understood, and Cassandra gained an understanding of the fade.
Solas wanted to kill the mages for what they did, but I would not let him. Enough people had died, and besides, if he killed them there would be no human mages to teach what they had learned. Solas was not happy, and he left.
He walked all the way back to Skyhold, and spoke to me. I was glad that he did, and we patched up things.
We scoured the Plains for lost artifacts, shards, and supply caches, and when we were finished with that we moved on to the Emerald Graves. I took Vivienne with me instead of Dorian.
We were looking for shards and red lyrium. We also found numerous landmarks for our troops. There was a large group of giants we had to fight our way through, however, and this was quite difficult, although not as difficult as what was to come.
After we found and destroyed the final red lyrium deposit, I saw a very large blue and gold dragon off in the distance. I turned to Cassandra, and she smiled. Off we went. It probably would have been a good idea to have returned to camp and stocked up on healing potions first, but alas we did not. This dragon was the most powerful dragon we faced to date. She was extremely difficult to damage, and did significant damage to our mages. Solas even went down a couple times, but Vivienne revived him. I found out how far a dragon can throw an Inquisitor with her hind foot. It hurt a lot when I landed, and I had to use our last healing potion. She took off and strafed the area with frost bombs, then landed. I went around behind her. Cassandra charged from the front, and I think she landed the fatal blow, but everyone said that I did.
We took the long way back to camp, mined some Everite, and picked a bunch of herbs, and fought a great bear along the way. We ran into a party of Dalish who were exploring an ancient tomb hoping to unlock some ancient Dalish lore. When we arrived at camp we were exhausted. All of us removed our packs, sat down near the fire and ate a bowl of august ram stew that the cook had prepared, and shared the tales of our battles with the rest of those in the camp.