Lauralae was born in the realm of the Aellyn, her mother and father a secondary family that, while not having the greatest of power, had a settled and confident place in society that left her raised to have her magic encouraged; the hopes of her mother laid on her shoulders with the idea that she would be strong enough, smart enough, to prove herself. Eventually, this would mean she would have a choice of a match that would please her, but the idea never really interested her: she would rather spend the rest of her life reading and learning, ignoring any notion of picking from any lineup that might be put in front of her.

Her childhood was normal, by the terms of her people, with little remarkable about her; she had the same strength that was expected from her kind and she was raised to believe in it and, in turn, herself, the power that she would come to learn to use and bend to her will. Her mother began teaching her the ways of womanhood and how to behave, as well as leading her into the heavily guarded secrets of the magic they were all blessed with, as her father crafted her to be intelligent and wise. It was not a life that she enjoyed, however; Lauralae, while she enjoyed her books and her learning, craved something more than her lonely existence.

There was a passion inside of her; she wanted more than what her parents could offer, even with all their position and power. For all that she had been raised to know she would have power and security it was never enough - she wanted more, like an inbuilt craving, a hunger inside of her that was suffocating and dangerous. She recognised it as such, of course, but kept it to her own thoughts. Why waste time telling people that she wanted more power when power was strength here?

She discovered the deep libraries, lost down in floors behind locked doors, behind large steel and guards that would slit her throat faster than they'd allow her to delve into the tomes before her. The books she sought were those most feared by the rest of her clan, dark magicks that were whispered about to naughty children, to prisoners behind bars, trickery and evil that only the most desperate or villainous turn to. It was not a desperation for power that drove Lauralae, however; it was a craving for the information, for understanding, appreciation of a dark art that no one else dared to touch. It was desire. It was like there was a voice coming from the pages, tempting her with whispered words of the woman she could come to be, the people she could come to meet, the places she could go. It was a desire for escape and, in her blind want, she neglected to understand the price that would come from her choice.

The book she chose, after exploring maps, novels, romances and spell tomes, hidden histories of her people and beyond, was hidden in the back of the grand library, buried below a dozen others that described worlds beyond the glen of her people, across seas and deserts that waited for her to find him.

At first, the true nature of the book was foreign to her - it seemed like any other book of magic, covered in fine leather and decorated with bright print on the front. It was only when she opened it, touched the paper, coloured with age and crinkled from time, that she understood what it was she was reading. There were hushed whispers, there always were, about the kinds of things that not even the greatest of her people would dare to touch. As she ignored the warnings from her teachers, reading on, she felt as though something was watching her, seeping under her skin and slipping through to wrap around her throat - trying to take her, take as much of her as it could. Her palms pressed against the paper and she felt something grab at her, trying to enter her through the barest of touch of her limbs.

In her blind panic she dropped the tome, falling to the ground and cracking her skin, her hands, on the stone, but it was already far too late. Whatever it was had seeped into her skin, through the blood on her palms, the open sockets of her eyes and the desperation for something to fill the gaps inside of her and had left her twisted and a shell of who she had once been.

The magic of the book preyed upon Lauralae's natural born magic, her desire for knowledge, a unique power, something to give her allies, friends, strength, more than her pathetic existence, and it twisted her for her sins. It seeped into the magic in her blood and coerced it, tainted it, until there was little left to be considered good inside of her. It had been waiting for centuries, eager to find someone wanton enough, broken enough, desperate enough to feed on it's own arrogance and greed.

And, thus, Lauralae was born, a damaged shell of the young woman she had once been.

For hours all she could do was sit and stare at herself, the transformation inside of her, understanding nothing more than the fact that she had been cursed and she didn’t know how, exactly, to undo it. There was nothing in the barren remains of the book to guide her and she realised that she was alone, damaged and broken with a strange whispering in her mind for company; a half-possessed version of the woman she had once been, the shame weighing down on her.

The most unfortunate side effect of the reading was the effect it had on her gift and her very nature. The magic that once came to her easily become difficult to manage - rather than being able to call upon her powers as she had before it felt as though there was a barrier, something she had to push through and force her body to try and grasp in order to make it work. The most prominent change was, however, the twisting of her hands. Rather than the pale, pasty skin that she was used to her fingers and palms were blackened, as though the ink itself had seeped into her and poisoned her, and sparks came from them and left them aching, desperately.

Lauralae was shunned, deemed a demon, a traitor. She had ignored the rules of her people, the children's stories that told of the punishments for such evil and deceit, and was cast out for it. Where she had hoped for acceptance, uniqueness, the support of her parents and a place more fitting for her than simply a bride Lauralae instead found exile. Her name was torn from the family pages, from history books, and she faded into darkness as though she never existed at all.

The only reminder she had from her people was her own self-mutilation, cutting her ears as if to say the exile was of her own choosing, a statement rather than a choice. She wanted to reclaim it, as if all of the things that had lead up to her leaving home had been, somehow, something she had decided upon - rather than a punishment for an accident of fate.

In reality, Lauralae had been forced into a kind of exile she had never imagined possible. Lost in new power that was barely within her control she fled with the clothes on her back and some books stolen from the library – and that was all she had for some time. It took her a long time to find a place and for weeks (or months, she can never quite remember, the time fading into nothingness) she wasn't herself.

It was during this time that her mind began to slip away from her. Being without company, companionship or solace made it so that her mind cracked, the weight of the power she'd had forced upon her tying in with her loneliness and desperation to leave her a shell of the girl she had been, once upon a time, wishing she could go home but revelling in the power she had.

Leaving her home and losing herself to the power that had tried to possess her it took some time for her to figure out where she had found herself. She had studied maps as she had grown and she knew the territory her people regarded as ‘safe’; she was far beyond those bounds, further than the things she knew. Ignoring what she knew of where she was she travelled south, by foot with nothing but herself for company. Food was scarce, rarely more than what she could pick from bushes and traps she could cobble together with twigs, but she found that hunger rarely came to claim her; there was something inside of her that seemed to sustain her but, the longer she left it the more deadly it seemed to feel - it was as though the power inside of her fed upon her hunger, her pain, and the longer she left it uncared for through ‘natural’ means the less she felt herself. It became a delicate balance and it felt as though there was not much she could do until she found a new home, a new place for her to live and survive.

The forest broke; what had been Noa Woods broke open into Moorlands. She didn’t dare venture far into them, knowing the tales of the witches that haunt the great lands to the East of the forests, and so instead she considered her options. She had no means of returning home and no desire to (even if she had an option to repent the way her people had reacted, while expected, had left a determined, stubborn feeling inside of her) and, so, she had to create a new home for herself, or the shadow of it. Deciding on her path, she turned and took the Eastern road, heading towards a place she knew might offer some haven for her; there were lands, even with the world changing outside of the insular world she was used to, that promised sanctuary to anyone that dared come to claim them. She would find her place there, if nowhere else.

The paths she walked were no safe haven for anyone and it was down to herself and no one else to try and find a means of making sure she was capable of surviving. Lauralae was afraid, and scared, and it was then that her first transformation was triggered, leaving her alone in the dark for longer than she can remember. When she woke she was herself but not, a twisted shape of who she had been, and finding a way to come back from that seemed to be one of the most difficult aspects of her magic. What she realised, however, that being the creature - learning, one night, that it was canine - was easier, faster, safer; who would attack a wolf travelling? What couldn’t a wolf learn to hunt, be it rabbit or something a little larger? She finally had a way of feeding herself instead of letting the magic taint her and she took to it as best she could, forcing herself to learn.

The place she had sought was Nimh Gleanne and while she found haven, of a kind, she dared not go too close to where the populace would gather. She kept to the outskirts, kept to the edges, as if that would be a means of keeping her safe. If she had any idea of safety she might have continued, moving south, as far from the homeland she had loved for so long as she could - but she knew her people and she dared not imagine that the kindness of the Southerners might extend to someone who had been changed as she had. The trust she might have held as a naive young woman was broken and shattered - she was alone, now, and she intended to keep things that way; if she was going to survive she had to do it without assistance. Nothing lasted forever, after all.

She simply lived, and existed, as much as she could without any aid - which, for a girl that had relied on family and magic for so long, was not the easiest of task. Relearning the things she had once understood to be second-nature to her was a long, arduous task and it seemed to near the edge of impossible for her.

She experimented with her new gift, of course, and found that the plants and the trees spoke to her, that her touch wasn't poisonous to them even though people turned from her in disgust, thinking she had a plague. The crackling power at her fingertips was enough to have everyone she met call her a creature that should be shunned; they knew of magic, of course, but the colour of her hands and the way they shook, the darkness in her voice and the wide, panicked gaze that never seemed to leave her left most people thinking her a madwoman come down with a sickness to which there was no cure. Perhaps the most damning aspect of it all was the easy default to blood magic to protect herself, forced to choose places higher on her arms to avoid the nature of her fingertips. The colour of her limbs, polluted from her own failures and inability to truly fight off the curse, had left her with the appearance of a monster, as though her body had begun to die and fail her but she had tricked death, somehow. She appeareed to be nothing more than a haunting image of a ghost mixed with what was left of her life and the people shunned her for it. Lauralae's hope in people began to fade and, so, she fled, adopting the forest as her home.

The most important thing she had to do was attempt to make a means of caring for herself, even if it was in isolation. Lauralae knew enough of potions, both things imbued with magic and tiny vials of things that were nothing more than ground herbs and lake water, to try and make a living but she was an unknown in the domain she had taken for her own. What she had to do was step out and find some way of showing her face that wouldn’t have her being ignored. The Drabworld, for all that it seemed to be as accepting of magic as she had ever imagined, was careful with what it shared. She understood, of course; something you did not understand was dangerous, something you could not trust.

Her lesson had simply come far too late.

As always, she harked back to her time at home, even if she loathed the thought of tying herself to memories of a place that she had abandoned, and knew that she had to find a teacher. To learn a means of producing things that people would want to buy, to barter for a circle of things that people might actually want. It was this that lead her to the rocky centre of the Nimh Gleanne proper, careful to keep her hood up as she considered what she could. It was on her third trip, when she had walked the streets of the city more times than she could count, that she found a place that seemed to be the best offer she would come to get.

An elderly woman needed help with her work in a store that Lauralae visited when her own stores were low, offering herbs and leaves from the outskirts of the forest, strips of skin she caught with her canine jaws, in trade for vials of poison and potion that she could use in her less than stellar campsite. While Lauralae offered little of herself - her name, her talent for poison making, her rather adept touch when it came to growing plants - the woman, Mayr, tested her, offered her plants to name, to judge which worked well with one another, and when she had shown that she knew more than the average wander she was ‘hired’, in a sense. She was taken on to learn, to be taught, and in return she continued to help with things around the woman’s home. Making things, cleaning up, going to the places the elderly woman couldn’t reach anymore - she proved to be a capable assistant, even if it took time for her to settle.

Settling into her new life was almost easy. While she couldn’t touch people, she couldn’t be around people without fearing hurting them - even if she shunned the world she still wished for the ease of companionship that she’d had when she was younger - she was happy, as much as she could be with the way that her magic ate at her. She still felt half-possessed, as if the moment she let her guard down she might lose herself to it, but she managed. Trying to understand the power inside of her became her focus, her driving force, and the rest of her suffered for it. She ate little, read too much and slept barely enough to live, forcing herself into a life with a monotonous circle as she attempted to reach out to the people that she met, hoping for a chance to find something more - or something to fix all the mistakes she had made. She had no other choice but to continue to live this way, ignoring the rest of the world.