I am cobbling together my backstory, but here's the outline (which I will post when I have it fleshed out):
Talashia's parents are Varisians who are separated from their caravan in a storm, while her mother is pregnant. At some point while they are seeking shelter, lightning strikes her mother, knocking her unconscious. Desperate and fearing for her life and the life of his child, Talashia's father carries her mother in his arms until he comes across Sandpoint and is given shelter while they both recover.
Her parents decide to stay in Sandpoint even after the storm passes. Her father sensibly decides it's foolish to try to travel with her mother so close to delivering...and her mother believes that Desana led them there for a reason. How else would she have survived that lightning? They take up trades and rent a room in the town.
Talashia is born. Tan like her parents, but with snow-white hair that contrasts with that skin tone. Her parents argue over it a bit, but her mother convinces her father to stay in Sandpoint longer, until the baby's a bit more grown up.
The young Talashia proves to be a handful though. A difficult combination of free-spirited and stubborn, she gets in more than her share of childhood brawls and is all too frequently pestering neighbors and getting into trouble. Other things start happening too, more and more often as she gets older. Odd gusts of wind that, by seeming coincidence, move things just how she would like, and strange wisps of light that flicker and dance outside her window at night.
By this time, her parents are established in Sandpoint, and find it hard to leave. Even so, as Talashia reaches her tenth year, the effects surrounding her surge in magnitude and start to become dangerous. It is at this time that a wizard and a few underlings from Magnimar are in town to study the standing stones and, it's believed, investigate the Old Light as well. Her parents, not knowing what else to do, approach the older man and confide their predicament and fears.
The wizard realizes what must be going on, and informs them that the only way to help the girl is to teach her to harness and control the wild, primal magic she was born with. That's something that can only be done at Magnimar. The wizard and Talashia's parents talk more over the next two weeks (the duration of the wizard's stay), and in the end agree to let Talashia accompany him back to Magnimar.
The girl has no patience for learning magic the scholarly way, but is interested enough in the subject matter to sit through classes in magical theory. She's as much of a scamp in Magnimar as in Sandpoint, but at least in the wizard school she's not alone in that. She's also taught basic exercises to meditate and focus the mind, that help her put an end to uncontrolled magical outbursts and focus her power with her will. In the end she masters several spells; manipulations of magical force for the most part, and completes her studies.
Now she's returning to Sandpoint to follow up on the initial expedition made when she was just a child there, many years ago.
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So there's plenty of room for further embellishment and tying together backgrounds and/or setting plot hooks in there.
