Before Anzja became Prioress of the Black Abbey, her main rival for power within the Church was a fellow cleric named Jenine. Jenine's family had served the Church for generations. It was widely accepted that the reigns of power would eventually be in the hands of Jenine or Anzja. What started out as a political struggle eventually erupted into a violent one. Fortune (or was it Kaz?) was on Anzja's side, because after weeks of bloody fighting between the high priestesses and their followers, it was she who stood victorious.
Though Anzja intended to sacrifice both the broken Jenine and her younger sister in a dark ritual dedicated to Kaz in gratitude for her victory over her most hated rival, Lyssa was nowhere to be found in the aftermath of the infighting. She was never as devout a follower as Jenine, and with the rest of their family and their servants wiped out, and Anzja out for her blood, Lyssa had little reason to stay in Upper Thalia. So, she paid a former paramour, a logistics clerk within the Upper Thalian military, to help her stowaway on an airship carrying raiders to Lower Thalia. When they landed to attack the tiny border village of Reardon, she grabbed a pack of supplies and fled deeper into Lower Thalia. She eventually reached the village of Traubin, claiming to be a refugee from Reardon. Luckily for her, the village had ended up getting wiped out due to the over-zealousness of the slave raiders, so there was no one who could refute her claim.
Still in her late teens, Lyssa was taken in by a kindly man named Roth, who had recently lost his wife to sickness the year before. Though he was her elder by nearly a decade, the two eventually fell in love, and Roth took the young Lyssa as his new wife. They had Boyce soon afterward. She had also become good friends with Shalleah Hyaranon, and her husband Sakai Seiji, who had a daughter, Cassie around Boyce's age.
Since entering into her new life, Lyssa kept her magical nature hidden from the other villagers, though Shalleah quickly figured it out, being magical herself. Though the two blonds were from opposing bloodlines, Lyssa descended from lower planar creatures and Shalleah from celestials, the latter accepted the former with open arms. Despite this, Lyssa was still fearful of anyone finding out about her infernal ancestry. Shalleah promised she would not say anything, but tried to encourage Lyssa to tell Roth. She saw how the older man looked at his wife and believed all would be okay if Lyssa told him the truth. Better to hear it from her than find it out some other way. Lyssa couldn't keep her blood a secret forever, particularly if her son was a manifest. Indeed, Lyssa soon learned she had passed these traits onto her son. Worried about what the future might hold for she and Boyce once his abilities manifested, Lyssa watched him carefully, looking for any signs that he was starting to develop powers. In the mean time, as soon as he was old enough to understand, she began teaching him about powerful beings from the other planes: the goodly angels, chaotic demons, and tyrannical devils, and how their blood flowed through his veins. But she made him promise to keep his heritage secret from everyone, even his father, because people generally viewed their kind with fear and trepidation.
Lyssa would have liked to teach him more as her got older, but unfortunately she never got the chance. An old friend of one of the village elders, a man formerly from Reardon, came to visit one day, and he had never heard of Lyssa or the family she claimed to be from. The elders were already on edge because of news of increased military activity from Upper Thalia, and Lyssa's deception proved to be a breaking point. When one of the more hot-headed members of the village council, Jarl, angrily confronted Lyssa in the village center, he got a little too physical, and Lyssa accidentally hurt him with her magic defending herself.
She ran home to Roth and Boyce, but Jarl had managed to rouse some rabble and demanded Roth turn her over for questioning. Cooler heads ended up prevailing and Roth managed to talk down the crowd, promising that they would get to the bottom of the issue, but not by having them drag off his wife to do god knows what to make her talk. After the crowd was gone, Roth spoke to her in the privacy of their home and asked her about that accusations, and she spoke truthfully. That she had fled from Upper Thalia, but she had nothing to do with her home country anymore. She may have lied about where she came from, but everything else was the truth. Lyssa loved him, and wanted nothing more than to live the rest of her life with him. Though Roth had vehemently defended her to her accusers, he was shocked at the revelation and told her he needed time to think. While his words may have been soft, the look in his eyes was too much for Lyssa to bear. And if her love, the man who had saved her all those years ago looked at her like she was some kind of evil monster, how would the other villagers treat her? Unfortunately, Shalleah wasn't there to reassure her, she and Seiji away from Traubin at the time.
Boyce caught the tail end of his parents' conversation, and though he did not know what they discussed, he did see the same look in his father's eyes that Lyssa saw. He was still too young to understand what was going on, but he knew something was off. Especially when they tried to act all normal afterward. Then, that night, when they tucked young Boyce (and Cassie, who had been staying with them while her parents were away) into bed, after Roth left the room and Lyssa said good night, Boyce felt as if his mother was saying goodbye for the last time.
And she was. Scared she had lost the man she loved, and worried what would happen to her son from all this, she ran away. Jarl and some like minded villagers viewed this as evidence that she was a spy and gathered a posse to take her back before she could warn her “allies”. Roth tried to find her as well, but to re-assure her that he still loved her. He found her by a cliff a few miles away from Traubin. As he tried to talk her into coming back with him to the village to straighten things out, Jarl and the other villagers came upon them. Unsure of the veracity of Roth's words and afraid of the armed villagers she backed away in fear. Roth tried to get her to come away from the edge, but she slipped and fell to her death.
The next morning, Roth tried to explain that his mother was dead, but all Boyce took away from that was how his father was looking at her the previous day, and how that drove her away. Boyce blamed him for Lyssa's death. As for the rest of the village, with Lyssa dying before anyone could prove she was a spy, and Roth vouching to the council afterward that she was not an agent of the Upper Thalians, the situation died down to a thing spoken only in harsh whispers. Though Roth was not on the village council, he was a well respected member of the community, and his word held weight. Besides, despite the accusations, the blond haired beauty had still been well liked by many of the villagers, so the ordeal quickly became the source of many rumors. While a small number of people did believe the “Lyssa was an Upper Thalian spy” rumor, most thought it was a tragic misunderstanding, and still others thought Jarl was a jealous lover and this was all a part of some love triangle between the three.
The whole thing became moot a few days later, when Upper Thalian raiders attacked the village and kidnapped Boyce, Roth dying trying to stop them. With Roth and Lyssa dead and Boyce long gone, the family became nothing more than a tragic footnote in Traubin's history.