Despot : The Formative Years

In a cold, damp, barely lit cave...
There was the cry of a newborn male baby and the painful groan of his mother...
They were alone, the babe and his mother. He... shivering and hungry. She... exhausted and determined. When her eyes fell upon his face, there was no smile. It was not a birth of love and excitement but rather one of determination. A determination on her part to bring some good out of misery.
The babe looked back at her with two pale blue eyes, the color of frost over a body of water... glacial. They were her eyes... She hated him and loved him...
As far as stories go, this is the beginning of one of heartache, suffering, pain, and loss. A story of a child unwanted, left to grow into a man who would shake the very foundation of the world. But for now, in the dark of night, there was only a wailing infant and his sixteen-year-old, scared and alone mother. Too young to have experienced the suffering she had experienced. And, so, in the flickering light of the small fire, the mother decided finally that the babe would live and began to nurse. With tears cutting tracks down the dirt on her cheeks, she named him.
"Ronin..." She barely whispered into the cold night air through muffled sobs. "Your name is Ronin. For you have no master and no home."
And in that dimly lit cave, hope was born for some, and doom was born for others.