The first rule that each and every child of Mnemon has to learn is: to be a true member of this House, she will be held to standards much higher than anyone she will ever meet.

I was bred for competence—excelled at it— as should be expected of a trueborn daughter of Lady Mnemon. I strove for perfection, my time fiercely devoted to my rigorous training as a sorceress, and in a span of years, my superb command of sorcery and my advanced knowledge in magitech at such a young age had forged me a comfortable niche in House Mnmeon’s frenetic hierarchy.

After graduating from Heptagram, I had received many gifts; gifts I had never even dreamed of having. My mother had brought me four hearthstones, a black jade breastplate, a gossamer purple furisode made entirely of spidersilk, a lightning box, and two pieces of moonsilver jewelry in the form of skin mount amulets. Chief among her gifts, however, was an insanely generous stipend – high enough to equal those of my eldest siblings. Unsurprisingly, this had raised many eyebrows and had earned me some dark, rather jealous glances from my beloved brothers and sisters.

Now, what exactly was my mother trying to do?

I knew that she knew well enough that to coddle one of her daughters and display even the slightest hint of favoritism was to do her disservice. I’ve heard stories about how my mother had foiled Ragara’s assassination attempt centuries ago. Suffice to say that some of my beloved siblings are not unlike Uncle Ragara once, mired in paranoia and fear, afraid of the possibility that their younger sister could outshine them and become a threat to their elaborate designs on the House leadership. My mother’s excessive gift-giving was a sign, a sort of a decorative banner to indicate that I was a promising young child, and I will turn out to be a threat indeed if I were left unbridled. Some construed my mother’s actions as favoritism; others took it in stride and saw me as too young and too insignificant to be considered a threat.

Nonetheless, the assassination attempts came and I faced them all head on. It seemed that many had underestimated my capabilities. My Ever-Vigilant Guardian, a magitech automaton crafted in Lookshy, saved me twice from being slain by poisoned throwing knives hurled towards my direction while I was meditating. Cloud people, loyal air elemental spies I summoned with sorcery, informed me of my siblings’ dubious activities. Sseljae or the stomach beetle bugs, demons of the first circle, took ingested venoms in my stead when one of my elder sisters tried to poison my beverage in a familial salon.

I stymied them all, with silent grace and a triumphant smile, as a daughter of Mnemon would.

The assassination attempts somehow got old and died down after a fashion until one day, Lady Mnemon herself had me summoned to her study. My mother was a paragon of power and majesty, still young and beautiful for all her years. Her violet eyes mirrored my own, and her full lips curved in an unfathomable smile while she stared at me from head to toe. Hanging from beside her belt was an ubiquitous emerald thurible, fastened by chains of gold. Beside my mother stood my elder sister, Mnemon Ordona.

“Here at last,” said my mother in a tight, expressionless voice.

I saluted with a deep bow. “At your command, dear mother.”

“Lady Mnemon,” Ordona reprimanded sharply, her outrage at my lack of respect written clearly on her face. She took a deep breath and prepared to launch into the usual tirade.

Mnemon waved my sister to silence. She leaned forward and looked at me with a long, searching gaze. “It has come to my attention that there had been attempts on my daughter’s life. Is this true?”

“Yes,” I said with a polite nod, “but I have thwarted them all, of course.”

“I see,” Mnmeon smiled, and there was an uncanny look in her eyes as if she were calculating my worth. “Well then, if you have no prior commitments tonight, mayhap we could have a gateway match?”

“I cannot deny such a pleasure, Mother,” I smiled back.

Obviously, I was of little match to my mother and I could only look at her eyes while she took down my boars, strixes, yeddims, and tyrant lizards. Yet she smiled at me even after effortlessly winning the game.

“Well done,” she said, her lips curved in a close-mouthed smile, a conspirational glint in her eyes. “Almost perfect.”

So this was merely a test. Had I shown any weakness, she would have simply allowed me to die. There was no place for the weak in our proud House, no place for unwitting fools. Life is not fair in House Mnemon, but it was not fairness that brought us to excellence, and excellence has a price.

“Almost perfect is not enough,” I said, smiling back.

My mother’s smile widened.

“Power through knowledge, mastery through rigor, and conquest through diligence,” those words, engraved in a white jade stone my mother Mnemon herself had given me three days after my Exaltation, were the very words that governed my life as a Dragon-Blood.

My betrothal to Tepet Eran was no secret. Like all such arrangements, it was supposed to be a union of convenience: to bolster the power of our respective families, to reinforce the alliance between our Houses—and needless to say, to reassure the greater glory of my mother, Lady Mnemon. Initially, I saw this engagement only as an obligation to the House, a commitment that I would perhaps loathe in time, a fate which I must learn to accept with grace and a false smile.

I was introduced to Tepet Eran, a hot-headed adolescent who seemed to be smarter than he looked, and surprisingly so, I found myself interested in him. This interest had slowly turned into admiration, admiration blossomed into fiery love, and it brought me so much joy when he reciprocated my feelings. It was a union blessed by the Dragons, an arrangement that pleased us both and our families, an important political tie and a romantic bond at the same time.

Many looked forward to the day we finally get married. That was until the Tepet Legions in the North were destroyed. The once-mighty House of Tepet had declined in the scale of power, and soon enough, even our betrothal was affected. Mnemon herself decided to terminate our engagement; she was not going to squander a progeny of good blood and pedigree for an ineffective alliance. That day, I was no longer allowed to meet Eran, and that led us both to rebel.

We were young and foolish then. We ran off together to the Imperial Mountain in a silly hope of screaming out to our families how much we wanted each other, but ah, love was not widely a respected thing among the Dynasts. It was only a disordering force that led the young into inappropriate, inconvenient and irrational behavior. My mother came to take me away from his embrace.

My separation from Eran triggered my Exaltation as the storms bemoaned a darkened romance. I have neither seen him nor heard of him since then, and I accepted my fate with the grace and swiftness of a dying breeze. My brief interview with Lady Mnemon three days after the incident instilled a new and grander vision in my mind: I wanted to become like her, to become the Realm’s foremost sorceress, perhaps even someone who would rival the Empress’ own sorcerous might.

My mother knew about my gifts; my inclination to the study of thaumaturgy and my academic competence during my primary education were almost unparalleled. She will never allow such skills to become emaciated. Mnemon saw to it that my education was superlative, specially-tailored for my intellectual prowess. It was she herself who had designed my Five Ordeals, the one who had initiated me into sorcery, and the one who had taught me my first spell.

I continued my magical training in Heptagram, and although I got a head start for being able to learn sorcery even before my admission to the academy, I found the course of the studies intense from the very beginning. My schedule there was not a regular one; the professors seemed devoted to filling my every moment with two different activities, preferably on opposite sides of the academy. My scant leisure time had been taken away so that I could attend more classes, and even my meals were henceforth to be taken in the company of a tutor. Being lectured on the intricacies of Fair Folk etiquette was enough to destroy even my appetite, my food pushed aside untasted. I literally had to run to keep up with my new schedule, and by the end of the day, my arms were heaped high with lore books and scrolls to be learned by the following round of classes.

My dedication to my studies had impressed my professors and the dominae enough that I was deemed worthy to be sent to Lookshy’s Valkhawsen as an exchange student. I originally wanted to go there with the intent of bragging about my training as I used to think that Valkhawsen was only a rather cheap imitation of the great Heptagram, but it turned out that I was wrong. The Lookshy Academy of Sorcery was the technomagical center of Creation. There I was engaged in various lab works; from alchemy, to clockwork engineering, to magitech. Not only that the Academy housed a more impressive arsenal and a wider array of magitech utilities, the students there were also more disciplined and fiercely devoted to their craft than those in Heptagram. I feared that the Realm would lose the magic arms race against Lookshy soon, so I learned everything that I could in the hopes of being able to help the Realm to catch up. After a year, I returned to the Isle of Voices, not only as a sorceress, but as a kinetropic sorcerer-engineer, and finished my remaining years in The Heptagram with high marks.

Despite what I had gone through and my achievements, I still occasionally think of Eran. Has he forgotten about me, I wonder?