Ralarulash stared at the cloak for a moment before he slowly stretched his hand out to take it. Experimentally he felt the fabric in his fingers, then draped the cape around his shoulders and closed it in front, hiding all but his head and feet. He looked down at himself, wriggled his toes in the sand, shifted his arms beneath the cape, then finally turned his frown on Cyrus. This hadn't been the wonderful, glorious transformation he had hoped for. He just felt weak and cold.

"You can stop calling me Leon," he said in distaste. "I'm neither lion nor noble. My name is Rulan, of the Casseion clan."

Everyone in the land knew the name Casseion -- centuries ago they had ruled the entirety of the continent with their bloodthirsty armies and their tyrannical laws, which they forced upon every civilization they conquered. Wherever they marched there had been rivers of blood. Those that resisted were slaughtered; those that surrendered were enslaved. They had spread throughout the continent like a plague, leveling civilizations and building weapons and fortresses, never to rest until they had claimed the land from sea to sea. It was at that time that the leaders within Casseion began to covet the land of their brothers, and the clan collapsed into a civil war. In the end, without organized governance the Casseion clan had destroyed itself with its own greed, and the current empire rose up and stamped them out. All surviving members of the clan had been gathered up and executed publicly, as a symbol that violence should never again rule this land.

The tyrannical Casseion clan had disappeared so many centuries ago, and yet Rulan lived.