Kyra was born into the unforgiving shadows of Aetheris’s slums, where survival was a daily struggle waged against hunger, cold, and the indifference of a city consumed by its own grandeur. Abandoned at a young age to the care of the
Trueheart Orphanage, she learned to navigate the city's underbelly, to scavenge for scraps, and to barter for meager necessities. The other orphans became her family, their shared hardships forging bonds of fierce loyalty, but whispers haunted the orphanage – stories of children disappearing, taken away in the night by men in black uniforms.
One icy morning, those whispers turned into reality. Kyra found herself snatched from her bed, drugged, and spirited away to a place she’d never seen before. She awoke amidst unfamiliar luxury – warm beds, clean clothing, and plates overflowing with food. It felt like a dream, too good to be true, and soon the truth unveiled itself.
Her new home's purpose was not to nurture, but to forge weapons. Children were subjected to brutal physical training, intense mental conditioning, and lessons in combat and strategy that stripped away innocence and replaced it with cold, calculating efficiency. Those who failed to meet the exacting standards vanished, leaving behind an empty bed and an ever-present reminder of the consequences of weakness.
Kyra, driven by a mixture of fear and a fierce determination to survive, excelled. She mastered the intricacies of airship piloting, displaying a natural talent for navigating the skies and an unnerving accuracy with weapons. She was physically frail though, something that annoyed her instructors when it came to dueling and assassination training. Her airship trainer though, a kindly older man who seemed ill-suited for his job, comforted her. He told her that if she worked hard enough and listened carefully to everything she was taught, one day she would surpass any weakness.
It wasn't until the day she graduated that she learned what he'd meant by that. Her instructors guided her to a personal room, a reward for graduation, and told her of the new, exciting training she'd soon undertake. She went to bed happily, unaware that this was the last time she'd ever feel normal again.
She awoke in terrible pain, strapped to a table in a strange room. Her arms and legs had been replaced with magitech prosthetics, her body turned into a weapon forged to serve the Empire's will. The instructors spoke to her in a language she didn't understand, and she drifted off to a sleep that would last for years.
Something else piloted her body now, and the years blurred into a symphony of violence. She lost count of the lives taken, her emotions locked away, her existence a momentary flicker behind her eyes. But even a machine can develop weakness. A moment of hesitation, a sliver of empathy in the face of a target's plea, was enough to brand her as defective.
The Empire sought to dispose of a weapon that could no longer be fully controlled. She escaped their grasp, leaving behind a trail of blood and fire. The memories of her past life faded, and slowly the Corsair side of her personality went silent. When she awoke, Kyra remembered little of what had happened to her. She remembered the orphanage, and some sort of school. There were no memories to explain her mechanical limbs, but she had clearly suffered some sort of horrible injury that had damaged her memory.
With her pilot training she was able to find work serving aboard bulk transport vessels, types that had little in the way of crew and gave her both money to survive and privacy. Her dreams were haunted by visions of her past victims, and she found herself uncomfortable trying to explain her odd appearance to strangers.
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