Mama. Mama was warm and light and all the good stuff in the world. Her and her little family ran an inn along the trade road in the Forest of Zulan, right near the exit leading to the city. Papa and Mama were both very proud of their artistic backgrounds; well-crafted sculptures lined the walkways up to their inn, The Season's Song. People loved the food that Mama made and the music Papa played at all of the meals, and the eccentric little family that loved cat ears so much that everyone that worked for the inn wore them was gaining popularity with every year that passed. They always had the richest vegetables and the prettiest flower arrangements, but that was because Mama was the Lady of the Seasons.
The Lady was a title passed on from mother to daughter for as long as the dress they wore had existed, and it was the Lady's job to provide in the way only the Season's could. Each Lady was, in turn, the season they were born into; Shion herself would be the Winter Lady after her Mama's Fall Season ended. Shion never really got to know the specifics, but she knew that the dress was supposed to be "a reflection of the Season of the Lady". Unbeknownst to the Daimah at the time, that was the reason why her mother was so good at growing and harvesting food, even when it was out of season.
Regardless, it was the Lady's job to provide. There wasn't a moment that Shion couldn't remember her mother going out of her way to help a stranger, be a wonderful hostess to her guests, or even take in an animal dying or left behind because of a neglectful master. Both Daphne and Svent Titus were kind people with large hearts, healers, nurturers and Essence mages by nature. These traits did not help them, however, when Shion woke to find her father's corpse half-slumped in her doorway, her mother's dress draped over her like a blanket, and a lady with a dripping blade at her bedside.
It was in this way that young Shion was inducted into the Order of Selene, carrying naught but her mother's clothes and Stuffles the stuffed rabbit. The girl was never told what contract was made by whom to kill her parents. There was a time in her early teenage years when she asked a Matron exactly that, but she was met only with a stony gaze and the words that would be her mantra for her formative years, "We kill for money, not revenge. Let it go."
That was what she told herself when contracted to make her first kill, Liandre. Her first girlfriend and foray into the world of pleasures. Liandre had found a lover outside of the Order and had attempted to abandon the Sisterhood without her dues paid. As Shion knew the target better than anyone, it had been her job to search and destroy. Khali had made it very clear what the punishment for failure was, and with a heavy heart, Shion had set to the task.
It was only after she saw her girlfriend and her girlfriend's male lover dead that she felt any remorse. She had been angry when she had heard the news; vengeful when she adopted the contract; Then morosely mournful. 13-years-old and finally into the world of assassination, the only thing that kept her from having nightmares every night were the words of the surley matron. Let it go.
Shion would never let it go fully. Reminders were needed to never repeat mistakes - mistakes that an assassin couldn't afford to have. So with every kill, from that very day, Shion made a braid in her hair to remind her of exactly what she had done. Her first girlfriend, a kindly old man that had gotten just a little too influential, all of them got a braid on the right side of her head. Over two thirds of her kills deserved what they got, to be fair - rich bachelors who were conducting shady dealings with people like the Black Sun, necromancers and mages who actually wrought havoc on populaces. But it was that that remaining one third that kept her up at night.
Eventually, people started coming for her. Inquisitors who recognized the signs of the Sisterhood sometimes tried to shake her loose the mortal coil, mages who knew of the threat dressed in braids. It didn't happen often, truth be told, but often enough for her to be saddened. Her dreams already danced with the dead, why did these people need to remind her? Bitterness started to seep into her being the day she met the man of her dreams: Sebastian the "Wetboy", the only man in her life that had held a knife to her throat and survived.
She had been on a contract in Kanon when she met him. She was walking the streets, hood up and dressed in her mother's best, the legacy of the Lady lost with her occupation in life. He was dressed like a knight, and for all intents and purposes he was, at least to the guards who didn't realize their comrade was dead. He had confronted her on the street and invited her back to his room, where she playfully agreed to a night of Curs and Inquisition.
That night was much more heated than she anticipated as she obtained several slash marks to her arms, a beautiful little bruise around her neck, and a chip from Sebastian's blade when she cracked it on the marble nightstand, along with several bones in his hand and his cute, inflated, and somewhat-earned sense of manly pride. After the fight and several hours after of vicious love-making, he explained where he was from, who sent him, why his breath smelled so heavily of garlic ("A bad clove-chewing habit" was no excuse - the pungency could kill a dragon and he needed to stop that immediately) and the insignificant detail of her having killed his father.
That was a problem. She had fallen head over tail for him that night and resolved to marry him when she could pay her dues to the Sisterhood. He resolved, through a lump in his manly throat, to kill her the next time they met. She, in response, had flirtatiously noted that he wasn't going to kill anyone shackled to a bed like that before hopping out a window and out of his life for another two months.
The game of Daimah and mouse was intoxicating. Whenever she wasn't on contract, she made it her obligation to hunt him down and almost be killed by him. After a year, he was letting her find him. After two, they stopped trying to kill each other out of malice and made it merely a habitual sport. In the third year, when she was 25, they were married. They couldn't settle permanently, not until her dues were paid, but they could at least start the process of having a life together. They bought a cottage several miles outside of La Roche and would spend any time they had together, fighting and learning each other's styles, trying to kill each other like they always had. At the age of 26 she gave birth to a bright-eyed little Daimah girl.
And a few years later life started to fall apart.