#almost like the letters are calligraphic ambigrams

[marlequinncos]

I directly translated Astarion's back scars

I'm a language nerd (even when the language is fictional), so I decided to directly translate the sigil that Cazador carved into Astarion's back.

I know you do find out the gist of what the scars mean in-game, but I wanted to translate it letter-by-letter, and then word-by-word.

We know that its a poem written in Infernal, which is the language of devils and the hells. If you translate it from Infernal, you get the following:

"Hoc inferius non iurare per ignis

Haec verba loquor

Et hoc mundo mutat"

As you can see, this is not English; its Latin, which makes sense since its a "magical language". Now, if you translate the Latin to English and fiddle with the grammar a bit, you get something like this:

"This I swear by the fires below

I speak these words

And this changes the world."

Obviously this ties in very closely with Astarion's backstory and I think its very cool that Larian took the time to actually make the scars real text instead of just random texture.

ETA: I want to point out that the "non" in the first Latin sentence doesn't actually make grammatical sense. I think its probably there to look cool/fill in the physical design, because excluding it makes the sentence itself make sense, and its exclusion works in the context of the sigil's purpose. So that's why I omitted it from my translation.