Quick self-correction: Variks has a piece of dialogue: "Are you staring at my arms, Guardian? Where Skolas cut me? Look away." Skolas docked Variks' arms during the Reef Wars, it seems.

It's highly unlikely that we'll have Fallen playable characters in Destiny 2 as the Fallen have unified under the House of Kings' banners, and will be a very large threat moving forward, unless Variks takes control and [i]doesn't[/i] betray us. We don't know exactly how (please correct me if I'm wrong) Variks lost his top set of arms, but it's implied. Docking in the Fallen culture is used as a form of punishment and/or a way of showing that an individual is of lower stature. Usually it's the bottom set of arms, but Variks has suffered cruelty under many different House banners over the years as a scribe and advisor for the Eliksni race as a whole, and was most likely docked as punishment for what was perceived as a transgression by the Kell he was serving at the time. I [i]believe[/i] (again, correct me if this is not the case) that it is stated somewhere that the Queen gifted Variks the robotic set of arms when he agreed to serve the Reef as Variks, The Loyal.

I'm pretty sure Skolas cut them off