“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?