Her home world was one of darkness, chaos, and magic. Monsters of horrible nature rampaged the lands, which bore conditions just as hostile. Most of society lived safely in underground cities, connected by tunnel systems. Only those who knew how to survive were allowed to the surface, and the death rates were still high. All magic was deemed illegal and any active magic users would be arrested on sight. There was a huge stigma against it because of the criminal activity and 'evil' that often surrounded it. So, even though anyone in her home world was capable of using magic, most chose not to. If they did, they either kept it a secret or were outcast to the surface, where they were left for dead or else skilled bounty hunters would track them down and finish the job.

Aurelia's mother and father met and worked together as armorers, crafting armor and weapons in the safety of the underground cities. They made enough coin to provide for their three daughters, though they were still middle-lower class. Her father often took the odd side job to make extra. He was rarely home, but when he was he had tireless energy to spend quality time with his girls. He was a family man through and through, and his marriage was a happy one.

Aurelia was seven when a strange man knocked on their door and handed her mother half of her father's coat. It looked as though someone had thrown it into a firepit and barely managed to salvage it.

The story goes that a thief broke into her father's armory. He defended his wares at the price of his life. The criminal had been a fire mage. They burned her father's shop with him trapped in it. Her father's body was so bad off that the policeman told her mother, "the children shouldn't see." Before he left, he mentioned that "there may have been motives behind the killing, a deal gone wrong, but we don't know." "We're truly sorry, ma'am." The door to that part of her life closed, and she received little in the way of justice or answers.

The Murlow children's lives went downhill from there. Their mother could not afford to keep their home. They spent the following years on the streets between tiny shacks for housing with slumlords that usually harassed her mother.

Kids her age began to ostracize her; she was the girl whose father was killed by a mage. It scared them, it added a heavy weight to her name. As if, should they befriend her, they might get burned alive too. Aurelia would get into fist-fights with the other kids for whispering about it behind her back and, soon, that fear was for her alone. She got into trouble many times in high school for bullying, fights, smoking, ditching, sneaking out to the surface with other kids her age.

Her mother struggled to juggle work and family, especially in dealing with the emotional turmoil of her three daughters. After a huge fight, Aurelia ended up dropping out of school. She left to find work to help support her mother and sisters. She found a crap job down in the mines, and stayed there for several months. She rarely went home since her work was far, but she sent as much of her pay as she could back to her family. Her boss had halved her pay because of her young age and inexperience, thinking he could take advantage of it. When she found that out she stormed off the job.

It was after that when she met a man by the name of Seren. He took an instant liking to her attitude, barbed as it was, and through word of mouth he discovered that she was looking for work. He saw potential in her as an apprentice of sorts, but she knew what his line of work involved. She was resistant to the idea of it, and brushed his offer off.

She went through a few different jobs after that, but her mother had grown sick. It was some sort of cancer and the doctors wouldn't cure it. Medicine was not advanced enough to be able to afford such treatments to someone who couldn't even hope to pay for them. Her mother wilted away rather quickly once the cancer spread.

Aurelia was 18 at the time of her mother's death so she was allowed responsibility of her sisters, but if she failed to care for them, they would be put into an orphanage until they were old enough to legally work for themselves. Times became tough and Aurelia couldn't manage to make enough to pay rent to her landlord, even though he unjustly raised the prices on her.

Desperation drove her to seeking out the bounty hunter named Seren, knowing that they could make a lot of coin in a short amount of time - which was exactly what she needed. He agreed to let her work for him, but her pay would be based off of commission.

After their first successful hunt, as Seren liked to call them, Aurelia was committed to it. She was able to make enough off of one hunt to pay two months' worth of rent and buy anything she needed - and then some. She trained under Seren for years, honing her skills to stalk and capture any kind of target. Seren eventually dubbed her his equal, no longer an apprentice but a partner. They were but shadows until it was too late for their targets, but sometimes they would be tasked with the capture of a mage. Aurelia especially liked those cases. Most of the time it didn't matter if they brought the mage back alive or not. Aurelia would always bring them back dead, showing no mercy to any cursed asshole that chose to wield such darkness against another person.

Hunting mages was a difficult and risky task, though. Seren, contrarily, disliked it; he had lost many crew members and partners to their deadly magic before, and he did not want to see the same fate befall Aurelia.

There was one mage in particular that resulted in a lifechanging event for Aurelia and Seren. He was a renowned magic user who was very powerful; an archmage. When the bounty for him was assigned to Seren and Aurelia, they departed immediately. The archmage, however, knew they were coming. He'd seen them in a vision and knew they would kill him. He saw fit to change his future, intending to trap the bounty hunters.

The hunters were ambushed by cult mages and their tamed beasts, barely managing to get through with their lives. Seren was afflicted with some kind of poisonous magic, draining his life force alarmingly fast. Aurelia could do little for him since they were so far from medical help. He insisted she leave him behind to save herself. Instead, she pushed on without him, in spite of his cries for her to stop. Knowing the archmage expected them dead, she knew she had to act fast in order to get the drop on him.

Even though she was able to sneak up on the archmage, he was ready for a fight. They both struggled to gain the upper hand, missing most of their major attacks until Aurelia was finally able to hit him in the eye with a throwing knife. Thinking she had him, she let down her guard and approached his writhing body. In a flash of light, she was completely paralyzed. She had no control over her body, not even to blink an eye. She could hear Seren's voice from somewhere behind them and, for a moment, she thought she was saved.

Perhaps she was, if you're looking at the big picture. The archmage was so powerful that he could've crushed her bones with but an utterance of a few words. Yet, what he did do was something neither her or Seren expected. He banished her from their realm. One moment, she was there; the next, she was gone. Still, she is far from dead... for now.

The Order of the Black Flame was a secret organization of people that believed magic shouldn't have been illegal in Aurelia's home world. They were a tight-knit community of mages and sorcerers who met in a vault, hidden deep under the city railways. They had collected ancient scrolls and spellbooks as well as written their own learnings of magic. This information was incredibly valuable to anyone that wished to learn the arts, but, remaining a secret came with high stakes. Information could not be leaked at any cost. If a person joined the Order of the Black Flame and learned their secrets, they could not simply leave it without consequence.

Aurelia's father, Silas, was involved in the order from the beginning. He helped found it and draw other like-minded individuals in, became apart of its councel, but he left most of the larger decisions up to the ones that wanted to make them. Even his smith logo was that of a flame which matched the order's insignia. He had a high standing among them. However, when the city's detectives began to close in on the Black Flame, capturing some of their members and torturing them for information, Silas wanted out. He wanted to keep his family protected, out of harm's way {that he could potentially have put them into just by being connected to him}. When he brought these concerns to the order and revealed that he wanted to leave, he was later assassinated. Meant to appear as an accident, the mage who killed him used a powerful fire to set his shop ablaze - with him and all of the documents inside.

Aurelia has no conscious knowledge of this, however, except for the bits and pieces she will eventually clue together as some of her deeper memories come to the light - and the mystery behind her father's death begins unraveling.