>>5776774Okay, well, maybe you were still the best-LOOKING, and maybe even the most popular… But that didn’t stop people from treating Henzler like SHE was number one. She was frumpy, dark-skinned and hazel-eyed, constantly tugging at her ruddy-brown bangs, hiding herself in an overlarge robe that fit her more like a tent, mumbling and unable to hold eye-contact for the life of her, and yet they all sucked up to her—the teacher’s pet, the Archmage’s daughter.
And, damnit, you’re not too proud to admit it to YORUSELF at least: she was the smarter of the two of you—almost always faster with the answer or, Gods Above forbid, slower than you but RIGHTER than you, correcting your own hastily-shouted solution with a better or more complete equivalent.
Cast out by your mother’s race, you’d finally started to build up your confidence here among your father’s folk—even to excel—only for this… This HUMAN GIRL to make you look second-rate, second-best, just ‘that wacky foreigner’ instead of the BEST of them.
‘Oh, the half-elf is better at natural philosophy, though!’ someone might say.
‘Well, of course,’ someone would surely answer, ‘it’s in the bloody EARS!’
Then, FINALLY, you found the subject in which you could excel—a HUMAN field, or at least one not stereotypically Fey. One in which Izirina struggled—even better! Even now, all these years later, it’s the one area of expertise where you dominate, and where your childhood rival flounders…
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