Before anyone should say that I am born of a cuckoo, born of peasant blood and sold come the dry season, I will say that I am House-born and reared in the Bright Court, for all the good that came of it.
I find it hard to resent my parents, although I envy their naïveté. No one ever told them, when I was born, that they had given me an ill-luck name. Blake, they called me, never knowing that it is a Vacuan name, and cursed.
When I was born, I daresay they still had reason to hope. My eyes, barely open, were still of undetermined color, and the appearance of a newborn is a fluid thing, changing by the week. Wisps of blonde might give way to jet curls, an initial pallor deepen to a rich amber, and so on. But when my series of changes was done, the thing was obvious.
I was flawed.
It is not, of course, that I wasn't beautiful, even as a baby. I am of Vale, after all, and ever since the Blessed Elua set foot on our soil and called it home, the world has known what that means. My soft features echoed my mother's in miniature. My skin, too fair for Jasmine House, was nevertheless a perfectly acceptable ivory. My hair, grown long and full of curls, was sable-in-shadows, reckoned a coup in some Houses. My limbs were straight, my bones delicate but strong. Even my Faunus ears, throwback that they were, were accepted within most canons.
No, the problem lay elsewhere.
To be sure, it was my eyes; and not the pair, but merely the one.
Such a small thing for a fate to hang on. Nothing more or less than a fleck, a mere speck of color. If it had been any other color, it may have been different. My eyes, finally settled, were that sublime color called bistre, a deep and lustrous darkness, a forest pool in shadow. Beyond Vale, some might call it black, but the tongue spoken beyond our borders is pitiful when it comes to beauty. So, bistre, liquid and dark; save for my left eye, where in the black iris surrounding the blacker pupil, there shone a fleck of color.
Red, it shone, despite how poor the word is to describe it. Scarlet then, or crimson, brighter than the Forever Fall.
That is how I entered the world, with a cursed name and a pinprick of ruby blood stamped in my gaze.