The 99th child of the 251st Sollan Emperor, William XXIII of the Aventine House by his wife, Maria Aggripina, Princess of Shakespeare, Selene was one of a batch of twenty embryos prepared simultaneously, at Caliburn House on Avalon under the direction of the Empress herself. That batch—which included the future Emperor, Alexander VI, was segmented out and gestated in batches of two to four, with Selene being paired with her brother, Prince Helios, 100th. While Prince Helios was dispatched to Shakespeare to live among the distaff line of the Aventine House—where he lived out the rest of his natural life, and died of old age in ISD 17134, well before the end of the Cielcin Wars—Selene was summoned to the Imperial Court at Forum, where she received her schooling and fast became a fixture at the Peronine Palace.

Marked out for her beauty at a very young age, Selene was rolled into her mother’s retinue when the Empress returned to take up residence in the Eternal City after nigh-on a century of absence. As a young girl, Selene showed great interest in horses and hawking, those being proper pursuits for a young lady of her station, and with her handmaids she was known to spend a great deal of time in the nature preserves in the Royal Wood. It was during this time that she became close with her younger brother, Alexander—the 107th child of William and Maria Agrippina—whom it is said Selene saw a surrogate for Prince Helios, since, despite the age gap created by their different gestational periods and the transit time between Avalon and Forum, Alexander and Helios—and indeed Alexander and Selene—were all fraternal triplets. It was Princess Selene who pushed the young Alexander to ask their father to make him squire to then-Sir Hadrian Marlowe, the Royal Knight, whom Alexander then greatly admired, and who first broached the topic with William himself.

It is not known when William XXIII first struck on the notion of arranging a marriage between Selene and Hadrian Marlowe, but it is possible that the idea began with Selene’s own suggestion that Alexander be made Marlowe’s squire. Shortly after Marlowe’s victory in the Battle of the Beast in ISD 16534 and his subsequent triumph and departure from Forum for the front on the Norman frontier, Princess Selene was placed in fugue on Forum and held against the day of Lord Marlowe’s return. By all accounts—and admittedly Hadrian Marlowe is himself our primary source on these matters—the Princess was happy to wait for him, at least at first.

Maturing into a noblewoman of no small fortitude and diplomatic skill, she nevertheless spent the majority of the next several centuries coming in and out of fugue, forever waiting in the wings as part of her father’s plan to adopt Hadrian Marlowe as his son and heir.