The Fan and the Flame II

There's a difference between pride and love. Sometimes I wonder if our parents would have loved us if they hadn't been so busy being proud of me. I want to be optimistic, but the whole "curse the name Love" thing made the answer pretty obvious. Love was never part of the equation.
When I was growing up, I settled for pride. It wasn't hard. My mother put a blade in my hand when I was eight. Not long after, people started using the word prodigy.
Social protocol says I should deny that. I won't. It's true. Humility doesn't always outweigh honestly, and when it came to fighting, I learned much faster than I rightly should have. My parents said it was because of the blessing. I like to think I would've been a prodigy either way, but part of me thinks they were right.
Regardless, it wasn't long before they had to call me a special teacher. After that, Taziel and I did even less together. We barely saw each other at all.
I don't quite remember when the dreams started. Perhaps when I was nine. They were brief, and they would wake me often. Sometimes after them I would sneak out of my room and crawl into bed with Taziel. They weren't scary, exactly. They just bothered me. I knew there was more to them. And it gave me an excuse to see her. If she woke up, it gave us time to talk.
We couldn't keep it a secret for long. When our parents found out, they sent Taziel away--a boarding school halfway across the continent. It was too dangerous for her to stay, they said. Because I loved her. There was no room for that in my destiny.