Where I came from, part 2

When I young, maybe 12 years old, my entire family was killed. My entire troupe, everyone I had ever known or loved up until that point.

I'm not going to talk about that.

For the next four years I lived on the streets of Tarbean scrounging for scraps of food and barely surviving. Winters were a nightmare and I almost froze to death several times. I saw the most horrific displays of human cruelty you can imagine and was lucky I survived the ordeal with my sanity.

I'm not going to talk about that either.

What I will talk about is a man named Skarpi, and how he is the direct cause of my being at the University now.

Skarpi was a man who told stories to street urchins in Tarbean. He told me the story of Lanre, which goes as thus:

Lanre was once a great warrior hero, but upon the death of his great love, Lyra, he became grief stricken and attempted to revive her as she had once done for him. Without the Naming ability Lyra possessed, he was unable to do so, so he set off on a quest to find a way to bring her back. He amassed great power in order to bring Lyra back, but was still unsuccessful. He resolved to die himself, and committed suicide, but the power he'd gathered to defy death proved a curse, preventing him from dying again.Mad with grief, Lanre laid waste to six out of mankind's seven greatest cities, either hoping that other powerful heroes would find a way to kill him or possibly just raging against the world. He bound Selitos with his strange new power, and forced him to watch as Myr Tariniel was destroyed, but for whatever reason did not kill his old friend.Some time later, Selitos cursed Lanre with darkness, shrouding his features until the stars fell "nameless from the sky." Thereafter, Lanre was known as Haliax, leader of the Chandrian.

Later he told me the story of the Amyr, right before he was incarcerated by Tehlin priests.

Don't bother telling me the Chandrian aren't real, and that this is just a story that isn't true. To put it in Skarpi's words, "All stories are true. But this one actually happened, if that's what you're asking." Believe me, anything you feel like saying to disuade me from my "crazy" pursuit of knowledge about the Chandrian or the Amyr, I guarantee I've already heard it. I know for a fact the Chandrian are real, the Amyr still exist, and the base reason that I'm at the university is to discover as much as I can about them; everything else is secondary.

Really, it's best not to ask.

--Kvothe

The Chandrian

The Amyr