Shamsi was raised by a family that valued the ability the healing arts. She learned from an early age the ways of flowers and prayers for use in healing. Her mother was a well known priestess to whom people from all over the lands came for the purpose of healing and becoming whole. Orphaned when she was 13, when a band of Aquilonian raiders tore through her town, she fled into the wilds of the Stygian lands and came to know a Cimmerian wanderer who became her beloved, Justinian Black.