The Academy

Matriarch Perhonen, my mother, operated something akin to a battle royal for the Perhonen Dynasty called the Academy, an uninspired name but sufficient. It is a secret system of child abuse, mutagenic augmentation, education, and indoctrination designed to strengthen the Perhonen dynasty. The philosophy, explicitly stated, was to push children through a series of brutal filters that would leave only those capable of leading the family to greater prestige, piety, and renown. All the children of the extended Perhonen Dynasty are required to endure the Academy. There were hundreds of them, at least twenty new boys and girls pushed out by hyper-ambitious, sex-demon-goddess worshiping bitches. Most didn't graduate.
 
My brothers were expected to serve as elite soldiers, assassins, and court attendants in the service of the family's great dynastic plan. My brothers entered into the "academy" at age three. Their education consisted of martial arts, military theory, court ritual, and once they were old enough, sex. Academics had little role. Calligraphy was considered more important that being able to think. Those that graduated could look forward to hedonistic luxury as scions and consorts of the Perhonen family. Most of them fit type, cold and calculating while being eager to please. A few stood out, little Nikki ran away. A set of twins that did everything together. Maybe some day I'll tell a story about my favorite brother Hanza, who meet his would-be assassins with debilitating puns before he slew them.
 
My sisters had it worse. They were expected to learn everything my brothers did, but on top of that religious doctrine and advanced skills as suited their aptitudes. Their greatest challenge was Matriarch Perhonen, who looked over their studies not with a baleful gaze, but from the shadows. Those that failed to display unwavering zeal and brilliance even in supposed private moments would become targets for even ingenious methods of killing. These incidents of filicide were part of their training, for those that survived or evaded the attacks were given another chance. If my brothers were uniformly terrified and desperate, my sisters were also arrogant and eager. Most of them fully internalized that they had a chance at becoming the leaders of an ascendant dynasty and claim unfathomable wealth and power. Those that choose not to pursue this path at least had an out; if a daughter of Perhonen choose to abdicate her royal name, she could become a sister in the Priesthood of Lolth. Only one of my sisters, Miezen, five years my junior, survived until I ran away. My father joked that she was compensation from Lolth for me. Her birth had been smooth and easy, and she had exceeded every expectation my mother placed on her. She was brilliant, beautiful, and appropriately bitchy.
 
Matriarch Perhonen never enrolled me in the Academy. My only expectations were to stay alive and out of the way. I lived a curiously carefree life without the lethal pressures that molded my siblings into weapons of dynastic politics. However, I was permitted to roam the Academy at will. Often I lurked in the back of lecture halls where my brothers we're learning about the fine points of poison making or my sisters studied moral history. While my bothers and sisters had to spend their every waking moment focused on survival, I could consume content at my leisure and inclination. The only subject that really held my interest was mutagenic alchemy. I came to realized that my hybrid anatomy was almost certainly caused by my mother's consumption of mutagenic concoctions. The irony wasn't lost on me.
 
I was twenty when I started applying myself. It was a strange thing to belatedly realize that I was a genius. My sisters struggled mightily to understand mutagenic interactions. Most of my sisters scrapped by through memorization of formulae. I taught myself the underlying chemistry. My art wasn't about cooking some recipe passed down by some long dead master, but understanding why the the ingredients in that recipe did what they did.
 
Matriarch Perhonen was a master of this. The only time she ever showed me any sign of approval was when I invented a more efficient and effective formula for a strengthening mutagen. My reward was to become an instructor in the Academy, teaching my siblings.