Hanara

The eldest child of an aging king, but a woman. The inheritor of a mystic power thought long lost, but small and frail. A daughter of the wind and the mountain peaks, but a soul of water.

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Father was an elder long before I was born. My line has always been long-lived, but he was a greybeard in my infancy, already fading into the twilight of his reign before having produced an heir. Sometimes I think he only deigned to have Mother whelp me because the Council finally convinced him that there would be a war if he died without an heir. And then I committed the sin of being female.

Even then, it took them another decade to have Erazel. He killed our mother as he was born. She was foreign to Father's court, a lesser princess from another kingdom, lacking the strength of connection to the Ancient Ones and their power, their lifeforce. It's a miracle my birth did not kill her. We all knew she would not survive my brother. But the Council would not stand to have a woman - weak and vapid and senseless - as heir to one of the greatest empires on the Continent.

I can still remember the looks on their faces when I defeated the swordsmaster, when I tapped into the magic passed down by my ancestors and bested the archmage, when I called to the sky and the wind and they answered me like an old friend. Suddenly I wasn't the useless heir anymore. Not when my brother couldn't do it. Some, pretentious and stuck in their ways, still would not support me; they would favor my brother for something as simple as an accident for no greater reason than their own pearl-clutching prejudice.

As the firstborn, as a true inheritor of my lineage and all the power that comes with it - the first in centuries, so long that some thought the blood too diluted to produce another scion - there should have been no question that I would become the Emperor. But in the year after my birth, before even the thought of another child had entered into the Council's thoughts, another was born to the king in the south of the Continent; a child of ash and fire as I was the wind and water. Our bloodline is not the only one stretching back so far, not the only one to produce scions, but that two should yield one in the same era? Unprecedented.

And unlike me, Keyn was born a man.

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