Cain is the illegitimate son of Count Roderic, from a distant, almost forgotten branch of the imperial house of Irwain, born from the count's affair with a servant girl and officially acknowledged only after ancient dragon magic awakened in him at the age of three. Despite his origins, he came to hold a more significant place in his father's family than the count's legitimate children, since he turned out to be the only one to have inherited the ancestors' dragon blood. A talented rider with a dragon of his own, he was chosen by his father as a suitor for the emperor's youngest daughter — a marriage conceived as a way to restore the fading branch's lost influence at court.