Valla was born to a small Kellid tribe that once roamed the far western reaches of Numeria. Shamed and frightened by the obvious demonic tainted her child bore, Valla's mother left the newborn to die of exposure in the snow when she was only a few days old.
As luck - or perhaps, fate - would have it, a band of Mendevian crusaders passed by shortly thereafter and discovered the girl in time to save her life. Returning as they were from a relatively successful skirmish on the southern borders of the Worldwound, the band's leader quickly decided to bring the newborn with them on their journey back to civilization, overriding his companions' concerns about the child's otherworldly nature and nursing her back to health with the milk of a wild goat they had captured as a supplement to their dwindling provisions. As they traveled, some of the crusaders grew surprisingly attached to the girl and, as they knew their duties would separate her from them all too soon, they jointly gave her the name Valla, after one of their own who had recently fallen in battle. Roughly one week later, the band reached Nerosyan, and the infant was given over to a local orphanage run by the Church of Iomedae.
It was here that the young tiefling spent the first six years of her life, and despite frequent words of tolerance and acceptance by one of the senior members of the clergy on her behalf, Valla's childhood was rarely kind to her. Her fiendish blood was impossible to hide and too many had suffered the horrors of the Worldwound in one way or another to see her as anything other than a fledgling demonspawn - an epithet that tragically grew to become as much a part of her identity as the name she was given by the Crusaders. Though she was taught alongside the other orphans, they never allowed her to be one of them.
