One of countless orphans left in the wake of the war against the Orcish Horde, Tuan was raised by the monks of the Northshire Abbey alongside many other children that had been likewise bereft of parents and guardians. She quickly learned to fend for herself, nabbing extra food morsels here and there, to bite and bite back and where to take refuge when the boys would get too boisterous. The abbey's library became a regular hideout, where she would stroll in and out of the winding shelves, looking at the covers and occasionally pulling out a book and paging through it at random. Naturally, the monks would invariably shoo her out whenever they found her, and this in turn made her increasingly skilled at hiding herself from prying eyes.

Exactly how she went about it will probably never be known, but somewhere along the line she learned to read in bits and pieces. When the librarian discovered her one day, curled up in a hidden corner and deeply engrossed in one of the larger tomes, he decided to allow her the luxury of moving about the library at will as well as educate her more in-depth, which further cemented her interest in and respect towards literature.

As soon as the boys started to come of age, the local sherriffs wasted no time in rounding them up and beginning to pound the legendary Stormwind discipline into them. At this point, Tuan began to realise her fascination with bladed combat. Like the other girls, she would regularly watch the sword drills, but for a radically different reason than the young swooning females lining up along the training fence - she observed and memorized, noted patterns and techniques and paid attention to the officers' barked instructions. She would often sneak in late at night and "borrow" a practice sword for a few hours, before a drill sergeant would catch her and roughhouse her off.

It didn't come as a surprise when she volunteered in the training regiment the following spring, and she quickly found her hands full. She wasted little effort returning the challenges that would inevitably crop up between the trainees, establishing her combat style as one built on agility and mobility rather than brute strength. If the officers took notice, they didn't show it - but they did take notice of the determined young woman's obvious battle talent.

It is perfectly possible that she could have become one of the finest soldiers Stormwind had seen in a long time, had it not been for her inherent difficulty with authority - or, rather, the difficulty said authority would face whenever she didn't acknowledge it as such. Following a succession of less successful drill sergeants, she was unceremoniously dumped from the training regiment. True to her form, she took this as an invitation to set her feet onto the path of the rogue instead, and has since found it much more rewarding than all the laurels in the realm.

-- A number of chance encounters has earned her a few unexpected acquaintances: the distinguished ArchDruid Pterneldan Crossdeep, purely by virtue of constantly running into each other while the elderly Kaldorei was busying himself with cataloguing the human lands for a personal project; and Theluin Moonwhisper, Druid of the Antler gone Priest of Elune, whom she more or less bumped into while taking a stray wander through the Stormwind Library during one of her bookhunts (their quickly discovered mutual interest proved to be a very potent icebreaker).

-- While carrying out a number of semi-covert recovery jobs in and around the ghost town of Moonbrook in Westfall, she more or less inadvertently had her first run-in with undead - in the form of deceased Dwarven excavators, apparently reanimated by rogue necromancers and subsequently pressed into service in a presumably abandoned mine beneath the village barn. The experience unbalanced her somewhat, and she was shortly after seen boarding The Bravery as it was making port in Stormwind, bound for distant Kalimdor. Exactly what transpired across the seas is largely unknown, but she did return a number of weeks later (carrying a somewhat rude amount of bounty money with her) and promptly made for the Redrigde province.