The Billown family has been situated on an isolated farmstead/hamlet for more than 200 years now, and has acquired a well-deserved reputation for clanish and outright isolationist behavior. While they do visit the markets of Daggerford and can be seen on religious occasions, it is rare to find them in town for anything but business reasons, and rarer still there is more than the head of the family with a few lads to do the heavy lifting. Less than kind souls even go so far as to call them incestuous.
Knowing the full family history makes their need for privacy more understandable, however. The family was founded by Heriot Berlowen, a barbarian warrior-priestess from further north, after she and her friends had laid a horrible devil-worshiping cult to rest. Heriot had been abducted as a hostage by the cultists, and despite a rescue in the nick of time, her proximity to the cultists master, a Pit Fiend, had corrupted her. Her first child was born hideously deformed, a half-fiendish abomination that to its mothers silent relief lived for mere minutes. It was this blow that convinced her to settle down, and as if to reward her, her later children were born seemingly normal and human.
The taint persisted, however. One of Heriots grandchildren (which she fortunately no longer lived to see) carried it in the form of misshapen legs and cloven hooves. A great-granddaughter was born with red eyes and a forked tongue - and the uncanny ability to tell lie from truth by their "smell".
The family hunkered down tightly, and hid these "cursed children", and was "rewarded" by the more obvious physical changes disappearing within a century. However, strange powers remained their birthright, and it was expected of any family member who discovered such a power to remain unmarried - just as it was expected from the rest of the family to allow them to live out their days.
In time, these (arguably sensible) precautions became somewhat of a family dogma. Possibly it was the fiendish taint that made them grow from sensible precautions to stifling, inflexible laws. Despite not having produced obviously devil-tainted children for as long as anyone could remember, the day Darie first lit a dim golden globe of light by wishing it very hard, she knew her life would never be the same.
She had been raised as sheltered as any Billown child, with her cousins and siblings as peers, and never much contact outside the family. While she had gotten love and support from the extended family in spades, there was no longer any chance of ever having more. No husband, no chance to marry into another family... nothing.
She tried to reason with her parents, but to little avail. Tradition and fear of her newfound power were forces too tough to overcome, despite her putting her all into it. Only her aunt Varil, herself only married into the family, had any sympathy for her plight. She took the shattered girl in, and during a waking night convinced her to seek her life elsewhere.
So Darie arrives in Daggerfort with what she considers her just birthright (or so she excuses taking a few essentials from the families communal posessions), and little more. The town seems like a proper city to her, but she is determined to make her way.
