I suppose I have gone into a good deal about the others in this particular tale, but perhaps too little about myself. You must excuse me, I am one who looks toward the future voraciously and views the past as burned leaves. Yes, but you are right, sometimes it is necessary to delve into the past. Not to paint the past in gold or fondle one’s self with nostalgia, of course not, but rather to make understandable things that are not always apparent—in this case, the alleged interplay between Rinlot and the House of Ordrid, the unalleged interplay between Rinlot and me, and how I came to this wretched mansion.

As I have mentioned, I was an orphan. The orphanage I spent my early years in changed names so many times I’ve forgotten what to remember it by. Names mean and do little. You may not remember the name of someone or something, but you’ll most certainly remember the contents of your interactions. The staff came and went in an ugly merry-go-round of snarls and abuse. A safe haven for just about every form of human depravity, it was also an academy for finding the vulnerable parts of the human body. When not being whipped by the disciplinarians, you had to contend with the older, stronger boys. I learned quickly the frailty of knees when engaged from the right angle, and the sensitivity of eyes when met with a twig.

No birthdays stick out, save one. The fog of early childhood memories unglue themselves. In the spaces between them are swish-swashes of disciplinarians disappearing to fight in the last stages of the wars in Rehleia, and armless and legless veterans hobbling in to replace them. Then came my seventh birthday, clear as summer. The Suelan cooks made me a muffin, shaped like a star with a little yellow candle.

Some of the other boys found it an atrocity they hadn’t received a star muffin. After being pinned down, I watched the leader among them, already as big then as your average dockman, stroll up and devour my present.

I got to keep the candle, which I jammed in the eye of the boy who had held down my arm just a moment before. If you push hard enough and hold in place, you can feel a squish followed by a nauseating give. It became a specialty of mine, you could say.

This boy flailed on the ground next to me as the disciplinarians broke through the ring. A man that looked like a shaved carnival ape, known for his heavy-handedness, barreled through, a closing wake of silent children behind him.