"If you say so, darling, but don't say I didn't warn you," she said, wagging a chiding finger at him. "Benalia was founded around a thousand years ago by a vicious brute of a man, Torsten von Ursus, after the fall of the Sheoltun Empire. He spent much of his life riding around and bringing all of the scattered people of the area together under his banner, which didn't leave much time for the siring of children - or, at least, the claiming and raising of them. So, when he finally died at seventy-two, he left what historians call the Lost Edict, proclaiming that none of his seven lieutenants would succeed him as sole ruler of Benalia. Instead, Benalia would be ruled via a complex system in which the seven clans of the country each bore a different responsibility. I'll skip the truly ridiculous method of governance, but if you'd ever like proof that your bureaucracy could be worse, come ask me about them," she scoffed.

"Seven hundred years later, Benalia was invaded and decimated, our people scattered, our infrastructure destroyed, our capital city razed. Once the invasion was over - it was a plane-wide invasion, Benalia was just the first to be occupied and massacred - Benalia devolved into a patchwork of competing...hmm, states? States might be the closest word. We were still Benalish, still a single country, but the clans had all withdrawn to their own lands, and everything else had fractured from there. By the time I was born, the Seven Clans were scattered shadows of their former power and glory, holding onto whatever fragments of power that the slivers, dust storms, and various catastrophes had left them. And yet, the power of their names remained, and those who could claim descent, whether through direct or indirect means, were automatically of higher stature than those who could not. So, of course when you married, you took the name of whichever person could claim a closer kinship tie. Which, I assure you, sounds much more egalitarian that it actually is, darling."