Joining



"Join us, brothers and sisters. Join us in the shadows where we stand vigilant. Join us as we carry the duty that can not be forsworn. And should you perish, know that your sacrifice will not be forgotten. And that one day we shall join you."

- The traditional words that begin a Joining

To become part of the Grey Wardens, a recruit must first go through a ritual called the Joining. One of the reasons for the small number of Grey Wardens is that few can survive this ritual. Only those who have a decent chance of surviving the Joining will even be made recruits. The ritual and the details about it are kept a strict secret by the Grey Wardens, because during the Joining, the recruits drink from a silver chalice containing a mixture of darkspawn blood, lyrium, and a drop of blood from an archdemon. Few survive this, but those who live become Grey Wardens — forever connected to the darkspawn, and forever tainted by the blood they have consumed.

Becoming a Grey Warden requires a dose of the darkspawn corruption of sufficient potency to have an immediate effect, rather than slowly corrupt the consumer into a ghoul. While archdemon blood is typically used, blood of other darkspawn creatures can also be magically treated to make it function in the ritual. However, the average darkspawn doesn't have enough of the corruption within it for this to work.

The Joining ritual grants Grey Wardens two abilities: they become linked to the darkspawn's hive mind, which allows them to detect the presence of darkspawn, and they become immune to further corruption by the Blight. However, they suffer from bad (if occasionally prophetic) dreams, ravenous hunger for a period following the Joining, decreased fertility, and shortened lifespans (most Wardens have only thirty years at most after their Joining before the taint consumes them). In addition, the link to the darkspawn hive mind allows the darkspawn to sense them, in turn.

Avernus, when asked, states that the darkspawn taint conferred by the Joining contains incredible powers, with the ability to sense darkspawn as the least of such. He speculated that applications of energy and blood could unlock these powers, and endeavored to replicate the effects alchemically — leading to the Power of Blood talent tree.

The dwarves hold the Grey Wardens in such high esteem that a King of Orzammar decreed long before the events of the Fifth Blight that any dwarf who joins them retains the caste that they belonged to.

However with progression of age the taint will spread and if the taint advances enough in their bodies, they start to hear the calling of the Old Gods and know that is their time to travel to the Deep Roads to seek out an honorable death as part of their Calling.

Notable victims of the Joining

 * Daveth
 * Mhairi

Trivia

 * No Qunari has ever joined the Grey Wardens. There are, however, rumors of several Tal-Vashoth taking the Joining in recent decades.