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Already, with his nonexistent beard, surfacer fashions, and charming wit, Varric had refused much of their house’s Orzammar traditions - leaving behind faith in the Ancestors and the Stone might have been enough to kill Bartrand. If only because his brother would throw an absolute temper tantrum if he’d heard them.
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Varric, scion of a dwarven noble house, tried to keep his religion private. That the religion was being spouted out by seven-foot-tall grey-skinned giants with horns only made the issue worse. Religion was always a finicky subject for people. It was otherwise a standard obvious-trap-with-some-quirky-characters setup, with the helmet-wearing Qunari ‘Arvaarad’ having been of a mind to kill their Qunari mage for some Qun related affairs. The most surprising thing about the whole mission to escort a Qunari mage - Ketojan - out of Kirkwall was that at the end there was a Qunari who could wear a helmet with his horns in the way. Varric found himself eyeing the corpses of dead and dying soldiers of the Qun, fixing the details in his mind about how their war paint looked, how they had fought, and how they spoke. It was a rarer sight for there to be dead Qunari and no dead humans or elves nearby, however. In recent times, dead Qunari were similarly not too uncommon to find on the Coast. Kirkwall’s coastline was littered with the remains of ships and the crews that served them - pecked at by scavengers of wealth and flesh.
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Refuse the will of others exerted upon you, and strike in mastery.ĭead men weren’t a rare sight on the Wounded Coast. Suffering is a choice, and we can refuse it. Loss of the self is the source of suffering. Mastery of the self is mastery of the world. Summary: From wisdom of the world comes wisdom of the self.
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