The court always seemed like such a strange, suffocating place for Basil. For all his tutoring and the heavy blood of a conqueror in his veins, he could not fully grasp its everyday function. To have so many people, boasting so many wildly different backgrounds and conflicting interests, shoved together under one sprawling roof of polished stone and gilded wood, it felt less like a seat of government and more like a cage filled with sharks where they were all forced to stand on each other's backs just to breathe.
Not that he was entirely unaware of the raw reason it existed in the first place. At the bare, unvarnished truth of things, humanity shared a few identical, base tendencies, and the most fiercely hardwired of them all was the instinct to follow power.
