AMITY: Simple. "Honor is paid for in blood." Hera taught me that, crazy bitch. She was right about that, though, if nothing else... or way, way too many things.

AUGUST: Uuuuhhhhhh... play it off! Dad taught me that whenever you're embarrassed or whatever, just joke about it and play it cool, y'know? I gotta' do that a LOT.

AYA: ... I... don't remember.

CLAIRE: Mmm. Our mentors... well. *I* remember what my mother told me... that I had all the potential in the world, and I had to do everything I could to reach it. And so we did.

CYRIL: My father was a Dominion soldier. Needless to say, I don't exactly venerate the man--but he imparted some things that I suppose could be considered wisdom in the brief windows of time I had with him. I remember something he said in one of our last conversations: A man is free until he is dead, even if only free to die with his teeth dug into his jailer's arm.

DARCY: Certainly, something comes to mind immediately! When I was a teenager, I found myself rather lost in the world. The Dominion was in the throes of its war and our village, on the edge of the Worldseam, was feeling much of the impact. Refugees seeking escape from the horrors they'd seen, attacks by knights and dearths of supplies.

One night, as the guards clashed with the knights who were seeking 'fugitives', my mother told me this: We breathe the land and it breathes us; it becomes our power and we become its power; so care for it, and all that treads it, that it never falls to ash. She didn't say it, but I knew the fire she feared would claim this world, and it was the very fire that raged outside our walls that night.

ELEANOR: "Hit back." Simple. Caught a lot of shit with the other kids, didn't really care for it. My dad taught me to fight. Always wondered why a farmer knew so much about how to knock somebody's lights out... guess I know why now.

EZRA: My parents were deeply unwise people. One-track minds, focused wholly on a narrow definition of success defined for them generations ago and unwilling to see the value in anything else. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, I suppose, and my father's insistence that I "trust no one absolutely" would likely have done me some good, perhaps.

FEN: "Nothing is permanent, death is to be respected, not feared." My job involves the dead rather frequently, as you could imagine, and internalizing that has made working with them far easier.

FOXFIRE: If you can take it, it's yours! If you can cut their wrist when they reach for it back, it STAYS yours!

FRAN: A necromancer under whom I studied once told me this: There is no higher calling for a vessel without soul than to be repurposed; and all of life is mere repurposing. My creations honor their constituents as the trees honor that which decays into its roots.

GAIL: Well, my parents were... eccentric sorts. I never really clicked with nature magic as much as my sister did, and bein' in a family of Wildkin, well, you could imagine that was pretty rough. They never got on my case about it, though--it was always me makin' somethin' outta' nothin'.

Not long before she died, Miara told me that there's a place for everything and everyone. I still like to think that's true, even of some of the folks I have to... deal with. Sometimes you can't take the risk and you have to take someone out, but sometimes the person you're looking at is someone lost, abandoned by society and lashing out 'cause they haven't found anywhere they 'belong' yet. I try to keep that in mind as much as I can.