When I was eight my best friend at the time was convinced that her father was the center of the universe. He was perfect to her, and nobody else could possibly compare to him. He was also a drunkard who beat Seizen men, women, and children for merely being alive, but that didn't matter to her. He was her father.

I hated the man.

I hated him because he was her father. I had never had a mother or father, so I was wildly jealous of people who did. But she was my friend, so I hated her father for being there instead of her for having a father.

I hated him for not being everything she expected him to be. She practically worshipped him ,and I knew that one day she would see what he was really like. It would break her heart. And I realized, despite my young age, that nothing would make him what she thought he was.

But most of all, I hated him because he hated me. He hated Seizen, loathed them for being blessed by darkness. He was frightened of them, but unwilling to admit that he was frightened, even to himself. So he hated them instead. He thought of them as inferiors, as being fit for nothing but slavery to the human race, or death.

As for a half breed, like myself...

He, like most other humans, even those who didn't hate the blessed dark, found the idea of a human coupling with a Seizen to be disgusting, perverse. Even if it were a Seizen man raping a human woman, both the Seizen and the human would be dead to most humans. And my mere existence proved that such a coupling had occurred. I wasn't surprised that he hated me. Everyone hated me, both Seizen and human, in the end. But that didn't make it hurt less when he drove my best friend, my only friend, to hate me for something I couldn't change and had no say in.

I barely remember her today. It has been several human lifetimes since I was eight. The dark blessing keeps me alive, though I usually see it more as a curse than a blessing. She is long dead, being human. There have been countless others like her, humans who could put aside my heritage, my blood, and see me as a person. She only haunts my memories because of her father, and her love for him.

I suppose most normal children have to idolize someone. We all need a person to look up to, to base our self-expectations and goals on. And a good number of children, like her, choose a parent. I probably would have done just that, had a parent been there while I was young. But my mother was dead; she died bringing me into the world, a victim of the bright curse that sits opposite the dark blessing.

And my father played hooky until I was almost in my twenties.