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My earliest memories are of just the three of us, our little family world that revolved around me. The outside world -the city and soldiers- revolved around my father, who was my personal slave (pretty much), so I was happy in my position of Center of the Universe. When I learned that there was a queen in Sol Falena and that she actually ran the world, tears couldn't begin to express my disillusionment.
All kids are pretty selfish. Not bad, not evil, the way selfish adults are. Kids are just testing to see how the world reacts to them, and it wasn't my fault the world ended up spoiling me most of the time. My parents had been trying for years to have and keep a child. I have three older brothers, but none lived over a year, and I was born three years after the last died. They're buried in the ancestral cemetery, next to my ancestors three generations back, three little square headstones. I used to lean against them and wish they were alive to play with me. Yeah, the village kids played with me, but we always knew that Father was running things. Whenever any sort of fight broke out among us, someone always accused me of being Father's spy. And we were all younger than ten. You see how paranoia can infest a defending city even down to the children. I tried to coach myself into developing a thick skin. It even worked sometimes.
Besides, I quickly decided that grown-ups were more interesting (except when they were being patronizing -or cruel). When I was seven, I decided that my best friend was going to be a thirty two year old cavalry commander named Rocco. By seven, I'd begun to wander quite a bit, and Father insisted I have some sort of bodyguard (paranoia again), so whenever I wasn't in a crowd or with my parents, Rocco couldn't really escape me. Questions, questions, questions, mostly about horses. If an adult bothered to respect me, I loved him forever.
Take Commander Ferid for example.
