Simple beginnings

A simple boy was Arxai, who grew up to become the very simplest of men. He was a lonely child, an only son born by freak accident to his very surprised sixty-year-old mother, and as a result found himself with few friends except old folk and a veritable menagerie of pets. He spent most of his free time daydreaming and pretending to also be an animal, so that his pets would play with him rather than running away. Unfortunately for Arxai, by his seventh or eighth year his mother had developed amnesia and his father had passed away. Thus he was not sent to school at an appropriate age. Instead, three years after he should have began, his mother finally noticed a book on a shelf one day and asked him to fetch it for her. When instead of the expected "Yes mother!" she heard "What's a book?", she realized her sorry mistake, and sent him packing off to the local monastery to learn how to read. Arxai did eventually learn how to read. He did not think he would ever become a great scholar, but he had a passable eye for texts, and his handwriting was not too illegible. Beyond the reading and writing and arithmetic, however, he discovered the even better aspect of monastic study - the training of monks, in which they physically embodied the animals he had always imagined being as a child. Throwing books and reason to the wind, he devoted himself fully to his training, his inner child giggling gleefully while he outwardly maintained the placid composure befitting a monk. And so upon his seventeenth birthday, armed with rudimentary knowledge and a wild imagination, he was granted leave from the monastery to travel to Seringale and begin his new life.