Shirava was born to reasonably wealthy and locally influential parents, though their power is practically irrelevant as far as the full scale of Vel Anir is concerned. She grew up watching the violence caused between religious factions, the violence inflicted upon her parents and the other people of Vel Stratholm by the Houses, and the violence resulting from the Revolution.

While her parents thought it was best to keep their heads down throughout the different cycles of violence, Shirava plans on using this system built on violence to save up enough money for her and her parents to move to safer lands and began working as an assassin. While she never asks for the reasons why her clients want their targets dead, so far the few jobs she has done have been related to local disputes. Each of the select few targets she has dealt with were all already engaged in some kind of violent dispute and were as unimportant as her in the grand scheme of things, allowing her work to go undetected so far, especially since Vel Anir has recently been struggling to maintain control over the nearby cities.

Shirava has been able to kill each of her few targets without them seeing her so far, meaning she has no experience in a true fight, though she is more skilled with her weapons than the average peasant. Because of her work as an assassin, she does whatever she can to avoid bringing attention to herself, meaning she does not let people get close, avoids talking more than necessary, and avoids confrontations however possible when she has to deal with other people.