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He is twelve years old and he has just set his family’s barn on fire.
His hands are shaking with the rush of power- he felt so alive- but his breath is coming short when he sees the look on his parents’ faces, pale and horrified with utter terror.
The first time he hears it is that night, words spilling from his father’s lips as his mother holds him, her arms loose about him as if afraid to hold too tight.
"Monster!" his father spits at him, his face twisted in an angry snarl. "You are a curse, a blight- I always knew there was something…. something unnatural about you!”
The next morning templars come to take him away, and it’s no mystery as to who called them.
He doesn’t speak a word of Trade, not like these hulking men in steel plate. Their words are quick and sharp and fly right over his head, though one of them is kind to him. He can’t understand what he says, but his eyes are soft and his smile warm, and the sweets he offers are taken like a feral animal accepting scraps.
He doesn’t know what it’s called at the time, but when he first arrives at Kinloch Hold he is barely more than skin and bones. He had always been a skinny child, all gangly arms and knobby knees, but now he could easily count all of his ribs. The sharp gnawing of hunger had quieted to a dull ache, and he quickly became used to it.
The first thing he learns is that as a mage, you are the lowest form of life. You are scum. And even then, you are expected to live and serve the very people who despise you.
The second thing he learned was how to speak Trade.
"What is your name?" his instructor had asked him one lesson, words slow and measured to be better understood. He chewed them over for a moment, carefully translating them, before shaking his head in a sharp no.
"You don’t know it?"
"I do." Those two short words are heavily accented, rough as they roll off his tongue.
"Then what is it?"
"No."
His name is the only thing he has left that’s his anymore.
Of course, that meant that everyone had to find something to call him. He suspected it had only started as a temporary thing- after all, no one could honestly be that uncreative- but it stuck. Anders the Ander from the Anderfells.
A bit fun to say, as well.
Eventually, though, he wasn’t even that. His accent faded and though he never forgot his origins, he disregarded them. He was no longer the scared little boy with knobby knees, wide-eyed as he clutched his mother’s pillow. He was Anders now, just Anders, troublemaker and visionary and, eventually, catalyst.