Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Age or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other fans like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.
Rating: T
Spoilers: May contain spoilers for Origins, Awakening, Origins DL content, and Dragon Age II as well as the novels The Stolen Throne and The Calling.
No Bull From the Big Bull, Volume One, by Varric Tethras, a Humble Storyteller
Excerpt: Birth - and Death - of a Monster
He was born in the middle of Wintersend, and born again twelve years later at the start of Harvestmere. Neither birth was easy, for him or his mother. In fact, his second birth came as a result of his mother's death. The creature that was birthed by this violent event did not die for another fifty years.
If the Orlesians had left his family alone, so much would have been different. More than likely, he would have lived out the rest of his life in quiet, comfortable obscurity as a freeholder, with little ambition beyond pulling in a decent harvest each year, and raising a family. Part of him survived that wanted simply that, but the rest was too badly damaged to make it a possibility. The cruelty of a social class that believed themselves chosen by the Maker and thus entitled to commit any sin they wished turned a young person who most likely would have grown into a quiet, hard-working man…into a monster.
And the monster needed vengeance.
Ironically enough it was his quiet, hard-working father, a man who knew the difference in vengeance and justice, who taught him to take vengeance when justice was denied, and more ironically still it was also his father who denied him the ability to take vengeance. If Gareth Mac Tir were not himself killed, the need to release that rage that built and burned inside of him might have slowly faded away…or might eventually have caused an explosion that would have destroyed him.
It almost did, anyway. Even once vengeance was taken there was no true justice to be had, not for the Mac Tirs at any rate, and with no justice there was no peace. With no peace, the monster could never die, the man could never truly live. The rage remained, only little faded with the passage of time - in truth, fed by the very vengeance it clamored for. A strange fact, known to few outside of dwarven Berserkers and the occasional Ash Warrior, but rage makes even the strongest-willed individual far more susceptible to hostile magic - to blood magic - than usual. His natural resistance was high; rage made him weak. Easy prey.
What saved him, back then? Was it the Landsmeet, where a remarkable young woman stood up to him before the entire country and demanded he stand with her or be shunted aside? In part, perhaps. Certainly he owed much to her for not taking her own vengeance upon him. But the breaking - the remaking - started before he ever met her face-to-face in Denerim. And it took far longer than the brief time he spent with her, cleaning up the mess he'd made, for the last vestige of the creature of pure rage to finally die, for him to find his strength again.
That death started with the near-destruction of everything he'd ever fought to save, was facilitated by a decade forced to serve within the very heart of his hatred where he discovered that the bulk of Orlesians were not so very different to the bulk of Fereldens, and finally, finally came to pass when that remarkable young woman finally said the words, "I do."
In that moment, when their hands and lives were bound together in the eyes of family and the Maker, the monster died, and the man was born again. This third birthday was on the Annum of First Day. Though the man was and would always be a hot-tempered warrior, he was now what he had never been before: a warrior who had found peace.