Full story [Prologue]

"The first thing I remember is distributing leaflets because of my family's constant debts. The second - my newborn little brother holding onto my finger."

As long as Ion could remember himself, he was always working. His family's money situation was, if to say lightly, quite terrible, and no matter how much all of the family members worked, nothing ever got better. Ion's mother, once a noble Valthos lady, was abandoned by her parents and deprived of her rightful inheritance after refusing to get married to a nobleman and stating her love for a mere traveling merchant, Ion's father. The pair, fearing to be despised by other citizens, eloped to a faraway town away from the city's hustle and bustle. But even if they succeeded in escaping from people, they found themselves surrounded by other kinds of problems.

Finding a place to stay at and work to do wasn't hard. Hard was deciding what to do with an unexpected pregnancy. Mother had to stop working, and while Father could earn money for both of them on his own, surely for the family of three, some limitations had to exist. Still, the child was born. A boy it was, and, what is more, a beautiful healthy boy. Ion spent his first years near Mother, who most of her time was looking through her old photographs. Ion didn't understand the reason behind his Mother's constant tears, but he knew that seeing her cry didn't make him feel good at all. He tried anything and everything to make Mother smile again, and she always patted his head as thanks, a habit which Ion later got himself. Soon, Mother stopped crying, for the photographs disappeared and were never seen again.

His next years Ion spent in his Father's company, who, as Ion later recalls, worked day and night to secure a good future for his small family. At first, the boy found it fun and tried to help his Father. Later it became another habit, perhaps not a bad one either, but for a 5-year-old kid it turned out to be toxic. The problem wasn't with Ion learning how to earn his own money, but with doing that and only that, all day long. Mother soon had another unexpected pregnancy, the one that the family just couldn't allow themselves to have. But they somehow had to cope with it. Father and Ion started working even more intensely, the latter cooking in his free out of work time since Mother had no strength to do all the kitchen work herself.

The second baby was born, another son it was. However, in comparison to Ion, the baby had more sophisticated looks, just like his noble Mother, and surely could be mistaken as an aristocracy. He also was weak and turned out to have health problems, getting ill ever so often. The child wasn't allowed to play outside and had to be taken care of by Mother. Ion watched his little brother with sorrow in his heart, the genuine sadness that he couldn't dare to speak of, as he continued to earn money doing some small work.

The debts started appearing and piling up, so Mother had no choice but to start working. Ion took the place of his brother's babysitter, as well as the housekeeper and family's cook. That was the time the elder brother got really attached to his younger sibling, spending all of his time together with him (partially because Ion got to finally play as a normal child, but mostly due to brotherly love he bore). They ate together, bathed together, slept together... They did everything together. Until Ion had to start going to school.