For as long as he could remember, Gurnam was obsessed with magic. His parents weren't rich by any means, but they were well of enough to pay a local sorcerer to see if he had magic potential. The sorcerer deducted that he indeed carried the ability to manipulate magic. He was overjoyed and his parents allowed him to be apprenticed to the sorcerer. However, a few years into his apprenticeship, his parents died in a house fire. The sorcerer took him in and raised him from that point on. He tried drowning his grief in study, and his power grew much quicker than originally expected. It got to the point that he started learning spells that he wasn't ready for, and when he attempted one such spell, the sorcerer saved his life at the cost of his own. And so he kept himself in check, learning his boundaries well and slowly expanding them.

References:
https://chroniclesrp.net/threads/arcana-intellego.2447/#post-56723