Numair let the silence hang in the dappled light below the trees for a moment, before admitting, "...I didn't want to be the Cynn, you know. No one else wanted me to be either. But no matter what I tried--and I tried a lot of very foolish things--I couldn't seem to escape."

He remembered the white-hot anger, so fresh that it raised his hackles and contorted his face into a snarl.

Everything was being decided for me as if I hardly existed. It enraged me.

But then my father was suddenly assassinated, and I was Cynn before I knew it.

And the rage had gone out like it had been doused in cold water--and it had, literally, in a way. He'd sat in a many-legged chair under a downpour, looking into a crowd so obscured by the rain that they were little more than blots of color.

Looking into the crowd at the coronation, I realized it didn't matter how I felt. I was Cynn; I was obligated to do right by my people. So I told myself: 'It's done. Now you must kill the part of you that is angry.'

"...But of course that's not how it works," he said somewhat sheepishly. Hawk gave a wry little laugh.

"Hah. No."