This is God's chosen land, and we are God's chosen people, and I am the only one who sees the horror of what it is that we do. They see with clouded eyes that which they choose to focus upon, and never do they think that perhaps, just perhaps, they might be blinding themselves to what is the actual truth.

Is one man better -- more powerful, more just, more noble -- than another, simply due to accident of birth? That question has always haunted me. I do not think that I can believe it to be true. Surely, if the second and third-class citizens had been destined to be our servants, we would have been set apart by them in some way other than by where we had been born! Or ... where I had been...

Lord Krelian tells me that I should not think of it. Lord Krelian tells me that I should not think of a great many things, and I find his admonitions towards silence somehow quite disturbing. It is not what he says so much as what he does not say...

Was I, truly, born to be part of this elite strata of command? Was I gifted, at my birth, the heritage of thousands of years of tradition, of nobility? I can remember nothing more from my early years than being told that I was worthless, that I was a failure, that I was trash -- but I joined the army, trying to prove that though I was, somehow, a flawed piece of work, I had worth. And why, indeed, was I told that -- when I was supposedly a first class citizen, with all that entailed, with all that weight of years of tradition behind it? I have never been able to get sufficient answer to those questions.

I have tried to shake their beliefs, tried to challenge them at the very core -- I have built this unit, the Elements, up from relative obscurity to something that is the pride of Jugend, and I have done so with nothing but men who would have been called worthless simply by accident of their birth. But always, always there is that shadow over me, the whispering hissing voices that call me trash, failure, reject. Why me? What strange portent was present at my birth that would make me so cursed, so reviled, that I would be so marked?

And is that why I am so sympathetic towards the struggle of those who are of a class lower than I?

For surely, if anyone can understand being outcast -- with all the implications of that word, out-caste, born in the wrong place or the wrong time to the wrong people, it is I.