Gloria,
Take this journey with me. There's no one I would rather take it with:
You are you. I am I. Events shaped us into who we are. What if you were not raised a Jerno? What if I was not sold in the womb? What if you were raised in Myrken or here in Rasazan? What if you were raised by a family with wealth? What if I was raised by dark elves underground? What if I was raised by a loving family? A family of cannibals out of the wilderness, loving or not? We would be different, would we not?
Would we be completely different, however? I think not. I would still be slightly shorter than I'd like to be, plainer in appearance than most around me would prefer. You would have your physical bearings as well. The liquid blackness? Of that I'm not sure but I assume (and you should think me a bad friend if not bad former governor for not knowing this). This affects our bearings, how we interact with the world.
A man born blind is blind wherever he is. He may be treated more kindly in one place or another, may learn different skills and do different things to survive, but certain perceptions of the world will the same irregardless of all these environmental differences.
What then of someone who lives a much longer life than you or I? Thousands of years to our dozens? Obviously how this person processes the passage of time is different than how we do. How might this affect him no matter who raised him and how? What if the person has an extra sense, as Rhaena did?
Does my height or my appearance only affect who I am in slight ways, but our longevity or lack thereof or our imaginary person's missing or an extra sense affect this being much more?
What other elements can shape this? What can overcome it?
Can our mortality ever be overcome? Does that shape our inherent shortsightedness and our selfishness, our superstition and fear? Will we ever be chained by it as a people or is it simply a matter of producing the correct environment to render it meaningless? In such an environment, would we lose our dynamism and ingenuity? Would we become complacent and thus experience a fall that would drive us back into sparsity and a wild, bestial state?
It's something to think about at least. It's everything to think about, really, isn't it?
Glenn