Born with her brother, Zed, from the rocks in the sacred mountain hollow above Joio, Zea’s first vision was of the open night sky. That visage of wheeling stars became the focus of her attention throughout her life on Iunn.

Raised by the elders of Joio the same as other children, Zea and Zed experimented to find their purpose within their community. While Zed found a calling as a guardian of the village’s wild goatelope herds, Zea struggled to find her passion, switching from one task to another without much success. She gazed at the heavens and wondered if they could ever be reached, touched, felt as the physical world could.

Ayo, Zea’s favorite village elder, told stories of the reddish heavens, myths of the earlier ages of the universe and how it once was very different, how it had changed. Zea was most fascinated by these stories, and Ayo inspired her imagination.

(Revealed in Episode X - Engineer)
“Zea's Icarus moment,” a series of flashbacks to Zea's childhood. Zea builds herself a pair of wings out of wild bird feathers. She climbs a tree on the mountain arch across from Joio and prepares to dive. Ayo reasons her not to jump. Zea nonetheless takes the leap into the wind and falls to the forest valley below. The fall breaks her legs. While healing, Zea lives without walking, depending upon her people.
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Realizing she would not find her place in her village, Zea bid her brother farewell. Zea set out to find a Metalfolk city on the edge of the mountains which practiced astronomy and which had a renowned observatory. She thought maybe there she would find her calling.

Zea was only a young girl when she came to the observatory. Though more accustomed to the bitter conditions on the mountaintop than most others, she was seen as an underling, even a nuisance due to her frequent questioning of the elder astronomers. The order of astronomers would not allow her to operate the telescope in the observatory or add her ideas to their work. Impatient, she snuck into the telescope one night and observed the arrival of a comet no one else had predicted. Zea was sadly exiled from their society, so she made her way into the nearest city of Dyin.

While amidst the overwhelming bustle of life in Dyin, Zea ran across a crew of Sayelmin planning a voyage across the southern hemisphere of Iunn to chart the stars. Zea managed to convince them to let her join them. She and the crew made their way down the winding river passages past other Metalfolk cities and into the sparkling sea. Awed at the wonder of the ocean, Zea fell in love with it. Though her main role on the ship was one of maintenance and attending to the crew, she took every opportunity she could to learn the making of star charts from the captain, a man named Ulo. She also learned to cook great seafood, and she developed a fondness for undulating sea slugs that could provide milk she could make into cheese.

When the voyage across the sea docked at a forest coast harbor, Zea decided to return to her village briefly to tell them of her journeys and that she had found her calling as a star cartographer. She promised Ulo and the others she would sail with them again. Trudging through the Woodsfolk realm, Zea loved the sight of wild creatures in the dappled foliage.

As Zea returned to her mountain village, she grew uneasy at rumors that the volcano where she had been born had become active after long dormancy. She increased her pace, covering more miles each day until she met the rising mountains. Smoke trickled from the distant sacred hollow, and she began to fear the worst.

The worst came to pass before her eyes as she approached Joio. An eruption of pyroclastic lava surged from the mountain, burying the village. Most, but not all, of the villagers had evacuated to the mountain ridges. As the flow barreled toward the forest below, Zed stood on the great stone archway that drew the boundary between mountains and forest. The village of Kali, settled in the valley ahead of the arch, could not be saved. However, the rest of the forest would burn and thousands more would die if the lava continued. Zea watched as Zed drove his staff into the rocks, shattering the archway into the advancing lava, stopping it in its tracks. Zea fell to her knees, crying as she saw her brother fall. Zed sacrificed himself so that countless others could live.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Zea met Ouy, a distant acquaintance from the village of Kali. Sharing the loss of their homes, and each their own beloved sibling, Zea and Ouy supported each other through a grieving and recovery, forming a strong bond. Each reminded the other of their lost sibling, and they provided a mutual comfort to each other.

In the following years, Zea lost her desire to be bold and adventurous in the world. Encouraged by Ouy, she decided to settle down and live her life in peace in the inclusive community of Shen. The village sat on the edge of the forest, the mountains, and the plains, a place where all people were accepted from wherever they had been. Most of Shen’s villagers sought asylum from exile in their own societies. Some simply wished to inhabit a place where all types of Iunnians coexisted in peace.

Zea and Ouy lived next door to each other on the outskirts of Shen, up the river a little ways from the town center. Zea attracted villagers who prized her skills as a cook, especially for the cheese she made from the river slugs who reminded her of their marine brethren. She kept the river slugs in a netted pen in the river outside her home. She never shared their names with anyone, even Ouy.

Zea and Ouy often embarked on hikes to the mountains to watch streaking stars or comets in the sky. It was on one of these evenings that the story begins…