Kallin is an orphan. That has been the cascading event which has defined her life. Her parents left her life one after the other in a very short time, and alone, in an unfamiliar city, she was cast adrift and left to fend for herself. Her father had died of plague when she was little, and her mother could not provide for her in the rural home she had been born to. Taking Kallin and everything she couldn't sell, Kallin's mother moved the pair of them to the city where a single woman had a better chance to earn a living. Six months later, Kallin's mother lay dead at the end of a knife in the dank back end of some alley. Kallin ran as hard as she could away from the crime scene, knowing that her mother had probably saved her life, but she found herself lost in the city. Nothing was familiar and she was alone in a place she did not know. She never found her way, left in the dark shadows of the spires all around. That was when she was 9.

She killed for the first time at the age of 11.

Deathdealer
Living on the streets, she had nobody to rely on, left only to herself, and she did whatever it took to survive, but she was still a child, and that meant she was often a victim. She stuck to the shadows when she could, but that was not always an option. Even living on the streets, others gave her a wide berth though, either seeing another mouth to feed or someone with less than even themselves, but in truth, it was the calm detachment she was possessed of that made most avoid her. Even to the desperate people, she was... unnerving.

Then came the day when she could not hide and she was left with only one choice, confronted with a predator who wanted everything. He was hardly the first to come looking for her, but it was perhaps the first time that Kallin felt she could fight back. She lured him into the shadows and nobody save her is quite sure what happened there. Only that she came out covered with his blood and whatever she could scavenge for herself off of his corpse. That death marked a change in her fortunes, and she seized her future with her own two hands.

Kallin had little formal education and living on the streets meant that there were few jobs for her. She found what work she could and for the next 7 years pulled herself up from the depths of the darkened gutters. The job that would shape the rest of her life was working as a bouncer at a gambling den. As small as she was, nobody was quite prepared for how dispassionately vicious she could become. Eventually she gained a reputation, and that reputation lead to steady pay.

During what seemed a regular evening, Kallin's reputation was not enough to dissuade an unruly patron and she did as she always had, attempted to silence him and found herself on her back for it. She calmly picked herself back up and drew her weapon, but the man who had seemed drunk moments ago was now standing quite calmly and assessing her. His shoulder was also hanging out of its socket. He asked for her help to put it back in and then invited her to discuss things more privately.

He was an assassin, and that act had been a test. Though Kallin had been rebuffed, she'd passed and if she was interested, she would be allowed to become his acolyte. The threat laying under that offer though, was clear. She had seen his face and would not be allowed to leave alive. No matter how she might have conducted herself, it was clear that he was many times more skilled than the farce he had adopted when she'd fought him before.

Kallin flourished in her new environment. She proved to have a deep potential, but unlike most of her peers in the sect, she did not share their passion for the work. It seemed, instead, as if she did this simply because she was good at it. She quickly rose through the ranks, trading the onyx stone that marked her status for the other stones of rank.

She climbed all the way until the second to last stone, the final one that would have marked her as a master. But that was before she tendered her resignation, in no uncertain terms, at the end of a knife. She doesn't speak of why she left, only that she left no small amount of bodies in her wake. Whatever triggered this... betrayal, it is in her past now.