She nodded, not frightened of admitting it in a room with only one person, who (she was fairly confident) was not a Templar. "If that was the rumor, that Paragon Dagna had figured out how to give dwarves magic? Then, yes, it's true. She made me a mage. That's what the Assembly made her a Paragon for; it was an innovation on par with Paragon Carridin's anvil, if not something even more marvelous." Signy couldn't help feeling pride, nearly glowing with it; she looked a bit larger, a bit more comfortable in her own skin for it. "I mean, they said that. She made herself into a mage, and then proved she could repeat the process. She really did keep it secret while she was studying on the surface? She… well, she talked about some things, like the lessons, the library, but she was never very specific on what the topsiders—the Circle and all knew."
For good reason, as Signy had been discovering. Up here, they had been dealing with magic and mages for millennia; they seemed to have a better, if a much tighter, grip on what was happening. From her observation, they feared mages; they treated them as dangerous, or reviled them, or simply shrunk away from them.
Her mind came back to the conversation again; "How topsiders view Andraste? A Paragon is sort of like that, I think. I don't really know much about your Andraste. She was a human, am I right, who did something so spectacular that you're still revering her now? And I gather she's dead." If Signy remembered right, someone had burned her; that detail stuck out in her mind. "The statues of her are all very slim and sort of small—they don't look at all reverential. I mean. No, that's not what I meant." That sounded awful; surely Bethen would be offended. "I mean, Paragons get great statutes, three dwarves high in the Hall of Heroes, at the Gates of Orzammar, and I've heard that in the Deep Roads there are statues miles high of Paragons, in their own thaigs." A miner had told her once, when she was a tiny girl, about the legs of a Paragon he had found, once, though he said they had been dragged miles from wherever the statue had once been, and were lying on their side in a well-traversed tunnel. His description had stirred Signy's imagination then. "But that's not what you were asking about at all. She's a Paragon—I think that makes her something a bit like your Andraste and a bit like your Queen? She certainly wasn't the King, but her word held more weight than any deshyr by him or herself; probably more than any but the most influential banded together."