bethen avilla ; the circle mage (bethe) wrote in thedas,
This Chant, your Maker. It was an odd thought that Signy believed either of those things to belong to Beth, when she had turned herself away from faith a long time ago. She almost envied Signy's own stable trust in her ancestors and the Stone, who hadn't turned its back on her, where this supposed creator had abandoned them more than once, leaving his children lost and in peril. If he ever existed, at all. She had seen the Fade and the Black City herself, so some parts of Andraste's story had to be true, but there was no way to really know what had actually happened, to know that he had made her the way she was, and reviled her for it at the same time. It didn't make sense to her when she grew older, it still wasn't clear to her now. She led her life by other examples, though, and with the best of intentions. Still, she didn't hold hate in her heart for those who still followed the Chantry, because it was wrong to group everyone together by their religion even when their interpretations of its teachings could be diverse. She wasn't even really angry at Maddock for his action, even if it had cost her a friend, who could have been sitting here with her had he simply drank from the chalice. Beth nodded slowly, "Yes, Ser Maddock believed...he believed that Byron, the man he stabbed, was going to hurt the rest of us with his spell. I...don't really know if Byron would have done it, if someone could have talked him down instead, but he was angry. I understand why Maddock didn't want to hesitate."
The dwarf wasn't kidding when she said she had many questions, but Beth was quite pleased to answer all of them. In another life, she might have been a school teacher. "I have, yes. I was about seven years old. And not all mages get brought there -- but that's usually only because they're either too difficult to catch, or because...they're dead, really. Often killed for resisting. For apostasy," Beth paused, thinking that she'd been correct in assessing that what the Warden-Commander did was right. If they couldn't find a way to take Signy peacefully, there was a strong chance that they would have been violent, and it wouldn't have stopped them from desecrating her body in the name of experimentation. That wasn't a thought that needed dwelling upon. She resumed her lecture, "There are Circles in just about every nation where people worship the Andrastian Chantry. There's only one Tower in Ferelden, but other nations, like Orlais, have more than one. Aside from not being able to leave, it's not actually a bad place to call home. You're housed, well-fed and clothed, and you never have to worry about wealth, and if you actually like learning...there's really little else to do but that."
At the mention of Dagna's focus on mage children, Beth couldn't help but be at least a little amused at her consideration of breeding dwarven mages, even if it was actually a very serious topic. Unlike Signy and all of her peers, Bethen was born with her power, not made; it was strange to think that Dagna had become something of a...god, in that respect. Indeed, she was worthy of becoming a Paragon. "We...no. We're not supposed to have children. That would be propagating sin," Beth replied sarcastically, recalling what the priests of the Tower chapel had always explained to the adolescent apprentices as a way to keep them from testing out their developing curiosity with one another's bodies. "But, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Some magi do have children, but if the Chantry finds out, they take them away, in the expectation that they will be magical, as well. It isn't always the case, though." She could think of one person in particular who been raised under the impression that he would be like his parents, but had become part of the opposite faction instead. "The Tevinter Imperium, which is further north and actually ruled by mages, used to track magical lineage. That makes us more like a caste, I suppose. I was born to rather ordinary parents, myself. My father was a merchant, my mother, before they wed, was a waitress. What about your family? If you don't mind my asking. Just, you couldn't have been born into some kind of...mage caste, if Dagna's only been there a few years."