> Am I over-analyzing? Probably. There's no indication that the existence of the Lavodes predates the Empire. Sethra is saying that the Lavodes as an elite trouble-shooting squad was created in order to deal with threats to the Empire that couldn't be dealt with using normal means. That said, Paarfi has some interesting insight into the question of Sethra's origins. I happen to be re-reading _Five Hundred Years After_ and since I'd only read it once before back when the paperback was originally issued, I've been coming across many things that I either didn't remember or didn't notice the first time around. One of these is this: _Five Hundred Years After_, pg 103.(citation courtesy of Amazon Inside) ----- The earliest authentic records of Sethra predate the founding of the Lavodes, and consist of a rough drawing of her device, which appears to have remained unchanged throughout her life, consisting of white Dragon's Head and Dzur's Claw on black -- unquestionably the simplest device in use at the time and the most anadorned of any time... Her lineage block, similarly, is in the form of a downward-pointing arrow-head or triangle, entirely self-contained, with no lines either entering or emerging, as if her maternal and paternal ancestor had appeared from nowhere at all, begotten her, and vanished. Lest this lead to uncalled-for speculation, we should note that, before the dawn of history, from which time Sethra certainly dates, there were no standards for lineage blocks, and Sethra was free to view and declare her lineage however she chose. ----- If we take things at face value, and then apply our meta-knowledge, we can see a few things. Firstly, in regards to the topic at hand, Sethra existed before the Lavodes did. If you want to speculate that she was part of some pre-historical group and modeled her own group after them, it's certainly possible but there's no evidence to support such a theory. Secondly, Sethra's lineage block shows that she has no parents and (I presume) no offspring. Since Paarfi probably isn't aware of the things that Vlad has learned about the origins of the Empire (though he knows about Jenoine, so this might be a flawed assumption) I'd guess that the "uncalled-for speculation" that Paarfi wishes to head off is that Sethra is a bastard with an unknown lineage. >From our point of view as readers of the Vladiad, we can instead come up with a different speculation - Namely, that Sethra literally has no parents and is one of the original "test subjects" created by the Jenoine. She's of "mixed blood" (her device correlates to her physical description, being described has having both Dzur and Dragon features) because she was created in a test tube long before Kieron and Zerika formed the Empire and the Houses began practicing their various forms of genetic in-breeding. Note that this isn't a new speculation by any means. It's just that this passage in _Five Hundred Years After_ is the first textev I've noticed on the subject.