For the young boy Alpheo had always been the sun around which the world was forced to orbit, the definitive blueprint of a sovereign. He was a man who balanced the scales of power with a terrifying grace: generous to a fault with his allies, a hearth of warmth for his family, and possessed of a will that could bend iron, yet never once descending into the hollow cruelty of a tyrant.
Basil was a child of the New Era. He had no memory of the shadowed, starving years of his grandfather's reign, but the stories whispered by his mother and the "uncles" painted a picture of a land transformed.
Under his father's hand, Yarzat had breathed again.
He had never been formally paraded before the masses or presented at the opulent feasts typical of the Great Houses, his father always kept him hidden, but the boy felt the pulse of his father's work in every full belly and paved road of the capital.
