The clash of blade and claw. The desperate struggle of survival. Mystorra was once similar to the rest of her tribe believing the only moment the soul truly burned with passion was in the middle of intense combat. The pale Xaela still revels in the thrill of combat, but her long time spent away from the tribe and the Steppe has shown her there are many means of igniting her soul. She has found passion in learning the steps of the Kreigstanz, spending evenings with her partners, finding new experiences.
Mystorra was born among the Dotharl, but wanted to fight ever more unique fighting styles. The moment she learned of the legendary prowess of the Samurai, her mind was set. Yet, she never managed to find the foe she sought. While she was travelling among the Doman lands, she was caught up in Imperial soldiers rounding up civilians for conscription. Her wild, near-feral tendencies while fighting the Garleans who captured her got her signed up as a the subject of a shady experiment. The scientists attempted to crudely infuse her soul with that of a Voidsent with the intention of turning her loose on a target location with the goal of having her transform and wreck havoc.
Those same scientists were extremely surprised when Mystorra returned back to the Imperial outpost alive and still without having succumbed to the Voidsent essence. Not sure what to do with her further, she was assigned as a special unit to Centurion Khana's unit in the XIVth Legion. She took to playing soldier with relative ease. So long as she was given sufficient foes to fight against, she was sated. It certainly didn't hurt that her commander was easy on the eyes. A rare fellow Xaela raised from infancy within the Empire was the sole commander who could bring the hot-blooded Dotharl to heel.
Their close nature eventually lead to a doomed romance. They had made plans to desert the Empire while Gaius was enacting his master plans at the Praetorium. Sadly, tragedy stuck during the attack on the base. Mystorra was almost past the perimeter when Ultima went off. Even the indirect blast sent her flying and caused her injuries that rendered her unconscious, the fate of her lover unknown to her.
When she awoke once more, she was found herself badly harmed in the Sagolii Desert. She likely would have died there if Miqote hunters hadn't found her and brought her back to their remote village to tend to her injuries. It was there that she first got into Monster Hunting. She used her ferocity and the medium of void powers she maintained from refining her connection to the voidsent essence fused to her soul to overwhelm threats to the village who saved her. Once she was fully recovered, she left the village to set out to be a Hunter proper in Ul'dah.
Yet, her past was not content to stay there. The experiment that fused her with the voidsent essence was crude and not intended for survival. Eventually she learned that the essence had been slowly eroding her soul, eating at it piece by piece over the years. A second experiment was performed by the engineers and scientists in her Free Company to fully merge the voidsent essence with her soul, shifting the very nature of the Dotharl to that of a voidsent. In the process of saving her soul, she learned that the voidsent with whom was now a part of her was that of the Hellhound.
Her sense of smell is extremely refined, to the point she can identify people based purely on the smell of their aether. However, the transformation did come at other senses changing as well. Her need for aether dulls her enjoyment of standard nourishment. She commonly augments her meals and drink with refined aether to improve the taste, though nothing compares to supping on living aether directly. Her partners, thankfully, don't seem to mind indulging her thirst from time to time.
