Twelve year old Cezar is the only child of the Varisian widow Dianni Razvan, a gorgeous woman who married young.Some people say that his smile is a trick, to fool you into letting him go as he pleases. Others will say that it's just a mask that hides away a lonely boy with no hope for his own future. More still will tell you that he's a genius with a heart the size of his brain. They're all correct.
From a young age, Cezar has always been marvelously curious as to how everything works. Everything. People, machines, puzzles, the weather. If it *does* something, Cezar wants to know how and why it does it. His curiousity has gotten himself into trouble on ocassion. Actually, he's had to trick his way out of situations fairly often using his impish grin and the sparkle in his eye. Actually...more often than not. But if he hadn't been so insistent on knowing what was making a ruckus in the alleyways at night, Cezar would never have met Reem: a brown piglet that he's kept as a companion ever since.
It's been a while since Cezar and Reem became friends, you'd really think that the little guy would have gotten a bit bigger by now. Cezar's never given a second thought to it, all of the adults love how cute Reem is, and he doesn't mind the little guy's size at all.
Oh, that sparkle in his eye. No, you didn't get something caught in your eye, his did. Some people are wonderful craftsmen, some can conjure the elements to their bidding. Cezar gave his mother a comfort nobody else could give: the silent presence of his deceased father, Mikal.
In the months of Dianni's pregnancy with Cezar, money was tight, and Dianni pleaded and begged Mikal to do some extra work so that they could afford to move to Korvosa (where Dianni had been raised). Mikal reluctantly took a job guarding a caravan to Sandpoint.
En route to the city, Mikal's caravan was assaulted by an unknown group, but the aftermath of their attack was a horrible sight; Burned bodies and mangled horses. The cargo wasn't even touched. By hands at least, it was destroyed in the assault. Investigation of the site revealed that the flames were magical in nature, but nothing further was found out. Dianni grieved for weeks, blaming her pushiness for Mikal, and the caravan's, disaster. Among the crew was one of Mikal's friends, who had a newborn daughter named Vasile. This accident left Vasile without any parents, and Dianni took in the infant to raise as her own.
After a few months, after receiving compensation from the merchant company that had hired Mikal, and after delivering Cezar, Dianni decided that it was time to move to Korvosa.
Growing up, Cezar always viewed Vasile as his big sister, and it wasn't until he was ten that he was even told about the attack. Even after learning this, he still considered Vasile family.
A few months later, Cezar and Reem were wandering the streets when they found an unmarked, leather-bound book. Naturally, Cezar had to read it. The book was a discarded spellbook, with but a few spells of illusion magic. Studying the book constantly, Cezar showed more and more ability in conjuring the small images, changing the world around him. Or at least what it looked like. The changes were brief, and they were obviously unnatural at first, but Cezar became relatively proficient with relative ease. Reem seemed interested in the magic as well, and you could swear that the little pig could understand just as much as Cezar did out of that book.
On his thirteenth birthday, Cezar became determined to learn more about the illusions he could produce, why he was able to do this but others weren't. He convinced people from his area to help pay for his tuition to the Academae, where Vasile had shown an interest as well, as her own talents were similar to his own. Now, here he is, ready to learn anything about everything.
