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Life was never easy for Starling Ione. She was the only child of pirates, left behind on the shore with her grandmother. Her grandmother made a small living as a hedge witch of sorts. In their little seashore cottage. Those who came to her believed in her gifts ? as did little Starling. When the child had vivid nightmares, they whispered she too had the Sight, or the "Shining" as the stories claimed that the Ione-family women always had. This was the identity forged for her when she was small, and it was what she clung to when the news came of her parents having been killed at sea. She'd had a thousand nightmares of her parents dying in different ways ? most would say that it wasn't magic that she saw it coming, but that it was simply a matter of odds, of inevitability. Still, Starling believed she had the gift her grandmother said was both curse and blessing of all the Ione women. She was an eager student and studied to learn all manner of divination at her grandmother's hands ? reading tea leaves and palms, cards and augury. She believed in the signs that the world held out for her, whether it was in the way the clouds crowd the sky or the curve of a bird's wing in flight. Her first doubt in her gift came when her grandmother became ill ? perhaps another inevitability but one the universe had not shown her. And when the doctor, finally sent for when the hedge witch's elixirs had failed, said there was nothing to be done... well, Starling hadn't seen that coming either. All alone, the child was taken to the Tragedy Orphanage, where she lived a few years before setting out to make her way in the city of Arx. Life's been tough for her in the Lower Boroughs, making her way by selling her fortunes or doing odd jobs here and there, not always on the up and up. Starling no longer believes she has any sort of psychic gifts, but she has a knack for telling pretty stories that some people will pay for.

Like the bird whose name she calls her own, Starling is small, quick, and dark. Thick dark waves fall freely down her back and around her face and are rarely tamed back by a ribbon or anything anyone might consider coiffed. The longer ends are burnished by the sun and match the whiskey brown of her wide eyes. Her face might be described as sweet, with full lips and soft features, but there's a sharpness to her expression once in a while that belies the naivete one might imagine there otherwise. At just a little over five feet, she's easy to miss in a crowd, but for her penchant for colorful attire: jangling baubles, colorful scarves and full, floaty skirts in a rainbow of hues.

Starling is a charmer -- when she wants to be. Fortune-telling is a bit like being a great barkeep -- people aren't always there just for the ale but for a good ear to listen to their wishes and their dreams. Sometimes she even cares about them -- other times, she does a good job of pretending to. That's not to say she's all sweetness and sunshine. She's more likely to banter and will exchange barbs when the time calls for it. She's not naive and she will fight for what's hers if need be.