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I remember very vividly when I first got to this part, and I was ultra-confused by the whole parley scene with Varis. I even asked a bunch of friends to explain it to me and got no satisfying answer. His whole motivation seemed to make very little sense, he’s almost like “Thordan 2.0” where he’s just going along with the Ascian manipulation and hoping to somehow double-cross them at the end? Seemed like lazy writing, which was kind of a mismatch with the high standards XIV had set thus far.
But now, having watched it again (and maybe with the benefit of some hindsight, though I’m trying to not reference future events here) I think I finally understand his position. He’s been told basically the whole Ascian playbook, at least what they chose to share with him, with regard to the reflections and the calamities and the rejoinings. He is FURIOUS that he feels that to them, mankind are like rats in a laboratory experiment, we’re always being manipulated and played to serve some Ascian goal, and his whole family and his country are all a part of some game. He knows the Ascians want the rejoining, but he still believes (correctly or incorrectly) that the rejoinings will somehow “restore” mankind to its former power and THEN we’re not gonna be pawns anymore, we’ll be equals, and we can choose our own fate. Ironically I think he values freedom incredibly highly, in the sense of “self-determination” and freedom to choose your own destiny. And he just thinks that a divided race of sundered beings can never accomplish that, in the same way that the rat in the cage can never really stand up to the researchers running the experiment.
It remains to be seen from this point if he’s right, or if he has any grounds to believe this or if he’s just been manipulated himself, or not (no spoilers in the comments!) but I really did NOT understand anything about his motivation until this re-watching of it, and now I kinda get it.