Piper Cloudwater was the third and youngest offspring of the last surviving members of the infamous Cloudwater family. Centuries ago, Piper’s great grandfather, Penn Cloudwater, led Kingsland’s forces to a bloody victory against a coalition of their two rival nations to the north, Prolg and Ghueto, in a battle aptly deemed ‘The Massacre of Howling Ridge’. Ever since, the family has been a highly decorated member of Kingsland’s nobility. In the years that followed the Cloudwater’s rise to prestigiousness, the family’s infamy swelled as Penn’s two children both proved to be generational prodigies in magical combat. And again with the revelation that Piper’s father, Seven Cloudwater, took up his grandfather’s mantle as top general in Kingsland’s army. When her father passed, Piper and her two brothers became the only blood members of the once-great family.

Following the path of his father, grandfather, and great grandfather, Piper’s oldest brother, Armen, was a born fighter. He graduated from the renowned Storm Acres Academy as the captain of the Team Combat squad - a sport in which five students from each of the two opposing schools battle to the death in an arena, sans the actual death (usually). The second of the Cloudwater children, Ecra, was currently attending Storm Acres a few years ahead of Piper. Just like Armen, Ecra was an active member in the Academy’s Team Combat varsity squad and was expected to step into the team captain role the following year as a 7th year student. And then there was Piper.

Unlike her brothers, who were both blessed with the physical build and impressive magical aptitude passed down from their father, Piper took after their mother. She had always been small for her age, with a slight frame and only the bare minimum muscle mass required to move it. Her aptitude for magic was only slightly below average, if the results of the Academy’s uniform testing process were anything to judge by. And there was her disability. Piper Cloudwater was born without the use of her eyes.

Contrary to how the rest of the world (loudly) viewed her condition, Piper did not find blindness to be so terribly inconvenient. Perhaps it was simply because the darkness was all she had ever known. Or perhaps because Piper had been able to dance circles around most adults on an intellectual level since she was a small child. More likely than not, though, Piper didn’t mind her blindness because she had never had trouble seeing the world around her.

When Piper was just a young girl, her mother told her a story about a blind young girl from her home town in the plains of Nus Darin far to the south of their home in Kingsland. Legend had it that once every hundred generations, the Nus Darin people produced such a child, blind, but with the ability to see regardless. The legend went on to tell of the girl’s extraordinary ability to sense her surroundings by detecting minute changes in the magic all around. Later research led Piper to believe that the tale her mother had told her was just that, a story to tell children as they fell asleep warm in their blankets. Regardless of any truth or fiction, the story made some modicum of sense to Piper. She had never seen before, in the traditional sense of the word, but her ability to sense her surroundings was very acute.

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On the contrary, instead of viewing her blindness as a disability, Piper found it to be her greatest strength. Sensing the world in the manner that she did provided her with a unique insight into the finer points of enchanting that, as far as she knew, nobody had ever seen before. She didn’t realize exactly what she was seeing when focusing on an enchanted item until midway through her first year at Storm Acres Academy. The Professor that taught first year enchanting, a waif of a woman called Professor Bags, had helped Piper to realize the incredible advantage she had in being able to sense magic directly. It was then that she learned that what most people saw was merely their brain’s interpretation of light hitting their eyes. Though there were a handful of people currently living on the Great Plateau that could sense magic in a manner similar to the way Piper did, they had to focus completely on doing so whereas Piper perceived her surroundings with the same effort it took for her heart to beat. Even someone that had devoted years to developing the sense would only be able to sense a tiny fraction of the detail that Piper did without ever even trying.

Piper’s mother and two older brothers discouraged her from pursuing an education with a focus in enchanting, stating that it would only allow her a crafting profession in the future. She was a Cloudwater, after all, and would never need the paltry income crafting could provide for her. Indeed, if Piper were to simply do nothing at all with her life she would never be left wanting for anything. Nobody would look down upon her for doing so, considering her condition, but Piper Cloudwater had never given much thought to what others thought of her. If she had, she probably would have ended up wasting her life away alone in their family’s manor, a ball of self pity wrapped up in nothing more important than her own idle entertainments.

That was not the life for her. What Piper wanted was to follow in the footsteps of the legendary detective, Joan Grasham - the protagonist of her favorite book series. She wanted to solve crimes that nobody else could. When she tried to explain to her mother at age ten that she did not need to attend school to be a detective because Joan Grasham didn’t, and that she could learn everything she would need to know in the Cloudwater family’s library, her mother simply patted her on the head and told her she could make her own decisions when she was an adult. Until then, she would have to do what her mother told her to, and getting a top class education was very much not optional.

Determined to begin her career as a detective as soon as possible, Piper agreed to attend Storm Acres Academy in the heart of Kingsland, but would put forth whatever effort necessary to graduate early. Now in her fourth year at Storm Acres, that desire had never been stronger.