The Darling Daughter of House Pirian.

The ideal target for a plot by House Banick to embarrass them. Captured in a plot hatched by the Banicks when she was nine years old, she was taken by the Cerak At'Thul Warlord Dominic Foresend (the self-styled "Master of the Blades") and held for ransom. A massive assault was launched by the Anirian Guard to rescue her from the island, and, to House Banick's chagrin and House Pirian's relief, they were successful.

Kristen, however, would forever be shaken by the trauma of the event. She responded to it in differing ways. She found religion in Celestialism, in Aionus the Sentinel, believing that worship of him would grant her protection. She became fixated on being in the right place at the right time (she had come to think her kidnapping was able to happen because she stepped away from attendance of the Homeland Parade to use the bathroom--wrong place, wrong time). She retreated into books for a time, having grown timid of the outside world.

Until she started to sense a gathering of magical potential within her. If she could harness it, become strong and adept in it, she could protect herself. But her family strictly forbade her from even so much as mentioning, to anyone, anything about her magic.

Years passed, that flame of magical potential cooled to the smoldering ember, and the Revolution happened.

Then, all of sudden, her mother and father wanted her to join the Dreadlord Academy. Wha...what? The Academy? No, no, how could she even...? She felt as though she barely had any grasp at all now on the magical potential she held when she was younger, and she'd never held a sword before in her life, and wasn't she too old now? But her family said that she had grown into a capable young woman (and my, look how tall!) and that she could be an exemplar of civic virtue, a model citizen of the new Republic, and a shining paragon of what the Dreadlords could be in this new age.

A nerve-wracking decision to make. The Academy, the Dreadlords, great hardship and harrowing battle, these were things which to Kristen were terrifyingly unknown. At first. Slowly she started to warm to the idea, thinking heavily upon her kidnapping, that dreadful feelings of powerlessness. Her mother and father were encouraging all the way, and even though they wished to see their Darling Daughter earn the prestige of becoming a Dreadlord of the new Republic, still it was difficult for them too.

The choice was ultimately Kristen's, and she chose to enroll. So into the Academy she went, as irregular as her admission happened to be.