As an infant, Imani was found by her father,
Frederic Havilland, amidst the shadowed beauty of Mangrove Glades during The Great Sentis War. Once the tranquil home of the
Sentis, the glades were a sanctuary of ancient trees, exotic flora, and rare fauna. Now marred by the scars of conflict, the glades became a husk of its former self. Frederic and
Violetta, Imani's mother, newly married and yearning for a child, saw their dreams fulfilled in Imani despite her heritage. They adopted her with open hearts, bringing a ray of hope into their lives.
Imani's early years were filled with the love and normalcy that Frederic and Violetta strived to provide. They often took her to festivals, extravagant bazaars and on excursions to the picturesque countryside of
Bixxieton. There she explored grand caverns and roamed the lush meadows of Lowever. The Havilland’s had promised each other to not let Imani ever find out she was not theirs’, per se, for as long as they possibly could. They were a proud and affectionate family, and they wanted nothing but the best for their child. Frederic and Violetta eventually had a child of their own, named Maks, when Imani was four, and her youngest brother, Ronan, a few years later.
As Imani grew older, Frederic and Violetta noticed there was something peculiar about Imani. It is commonly known within
Vanori that newborn children provide a certain warmth and comfort with their presence caused by the abundance of ohmi surging through the infant’s veins. As a child reaches their sixth or seventh year, that feeling of ease dissipates as the child is able to regulate their ohmi.
The day Frederic found Imani he did notice that she did not have that commonplace vibrancy. Violetta noticed it too as time went on, but she thought it might have been that Imani’s ohmi potency was simply not strong; which is not uncommon. The family did not pay any mind to this, then minor fluke, and continued thinking Imani would find her energy flow as she grew. Imani had four birthdays and nothing about her aura had changed. She lived and acted like any normal child would, but something about her essence was not lively enough. The Havillands had begun to panic because this type of late blooming did
not happen. They took her to a specialist to find a solution, but after many tests, he was left bewildered, too. His only solution to the medical mystery was to give Imani a strong dosage of Imitation ohmi elixir.
The anomaly caused Imani much inner turmoil, as the townsfolk grappled with the oddity of a person devoid of ohmi. It was a peculiarity unheard of in their society, casting a shadow of mystery and uncertainty over Imani's existence. Her interactions with peers shaped her into an outlier, and she often faced otherness. While this proved to be challenging, it did help to instill in her an extraordinary resilience and adaptability. It also forced her to find alternative ways to interact with her environment and develop a keen sense of observation and intuition. She learned to read situations and people more accurately to compensate for her lack of magical intuition.
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