“Well”—Gilda shrugged—“some say it was more pragmatic than that. Before he became our Primo Basileus, King Fortis was a tiercel from a very unremarkable family and ancestry. However, he was a griffin of particularly strong will and sharp mind.” The eagless stretched her claws a bit. “His path of growing was not easy. A lot of his early memoirs were mostly in regards to favoritism towards ancestry and lineages. When he came to power, the griffins were at war with an enemy that used our own reverence of bloodlines against us, destroying all of the Blessed along the way. What King Fortis established from the ruins was a system so that griffins like him wouldn’t bow down to others just because of ancestry.” 