Lucien d'Aronde was born into a modest family in one of the Republic of Salvos provinces, his family ran a small vineyard just outside a small wine-growing village. He was the second son. The d'Arondes had worked the same patch of land for generations, never wealthy but always getting by, and after the Salvian Revolution overthrew and executed the local crown, families like his basically had to figure out where they stood in the new order. by the time Lucien was born things had gotten harder, the vineyard wasnt bringing in what it used to, and they were just sort of holding on. His older brother Henri was being raised to take over whatever was left of the family land, while Lucien being quieter and more into books from a young age, he got sent at fifteen to study under a parish priest who used to work as a clerk in the capital. Under him Lucien just read a lot, law, rhetoric, theology, and he kind of got obsessed with how the Republic actually worked, the Senate, the courts, the whole idea that power could rest on arguments and institutions instead of blood and titles. The priest died of fever in the fourth year of the arrangement so Lucien went back home but he didnt really have many options anymore, and the village was quieter than he remembered it. Then not long after, the Republic itself got crushed in the Siege for Salvo and the Lone Star Revolution, all the institutions he had spent years studying basically dissolved, and even the small life his family had managed to keep going slowly fell apart with it. So with his mothers push and a small purse from his fathers reluctant savings, Lucien set out for the Empire of Man to find work as a scribe or a clerk to someone whose work actually mattered.
