Seasmil,” I often have to tell myself. “If you are going to go into the backstory, be sure not to leave out the most important stuff.” For backstory is merely useful for jutting us forward into that great, mysterious yonder. And I should know this, being I’ve spent more nights falling through book’s pages than your average paid scholar. With this bit in mind, telling my tale would be a wide chasm from thorough if I failed to tell of my father, in his entirety, as is best known to me.

No, not some Ordrid—though you may have anticipated such a revelation due to, among other things, my habits and choice of work.

No, my father was Augnor Oleugsby, a cavalryman in the notorious regiment Swift Saber. The SS was a highly deployed unit under the Conqueror himself, and subsequently, I don’t have any recollection of my father in the house amid my earliest years. Despite his absence, we did not struggle. Charges and pillages accumulated, bringing back chest upon chest of jewels and coin.

My father was a beast of a man, a stone golem with legs like unhewn trees, and a neck like an oxen in the farmlands where Mother had come out of.

The first memory I can muster was of him telling Mother a spirited story. With the smell of the saddle still lingering, he recounted riding through the farmlands of Serabandantilith and mowing the villagers down like grass. I didn’t hear the whole tale, and time has a way of inflating and deflating the sanctity of memory, but I do remember a comparison of some people to the height of our kitchen cupboard. I was eye level with the cupboard myself back then and tried to make sense of how men were so small in other lands. As was her nature, or at least her developed one, Mother listened half-heartedly, trying multiple times in vain to clue Father in that I was listening, and do so without infuriating him.

Whether Father was riding the famed memory of his grand-father, or was an exemplary soldier, or a combination of the two, I do not know, but he’d embarked on a career in which he was being groomed for a lofty and prestigious rank. Chief Horseman perhaps, or maybe a lower seat in the Office of Scepters when his ruthlessness left the saber and moved to an inkwell. All I know is, wherever he was slotted to go came to a sudden and unmovable halt when I was about ten.