Varric: What’s with you and the doom stuff? Are you always this cheery or is the hole in the sky getting to you? Solas: I’ve no idea what you mean. Varric: All the “fallen empire” crap you go on about. What’s so great about empires anyway? Varric: So we lost the Deep Roads, and Orzammar’s too proud to ask for help. So what? We’re not Orzammar and we’re not our empire. Varric: There are tens of thousands of us living up here in the sunlight now, and it’s not that bad. Varric: Life goes on. It’s just different than it used to be. Solas: And you have no concept of what that difference cost you. Varric: Oh I know what it didn’t cost me. I’m still here, even after all those thaigs fell. Solas: You truly are content to sit in the sun, never wondering what you could’ve been, never fighting back? Varric: Ha, you’ve got it all wrong, Chuckles. This is fighting back. Solas: How does passively accepting your fate constitute a fight? Varric: In that story of yours—the fisherman watching the stars, dying alone—you thought he gave up right? Solas: Yes. Varric: But he went on living. He lost everyone, but he still got up every morning. He made a life, even if it was alone. Varric: That’s the world. Everything you build, it tears down. Everything you’ve got, it takes—and it’s gone forever. Varric: The only choices you get are to lie down and die or keep going. He kept going. That’s as close to beating the world as anyone gets. Solas: Well said. Perhaps I was mistaken.
