Illumina Margaret O'Malley Pent, Mina to her friends, was born in Ireland, the middle child in a family of thirteen. She learned to read at the age of five, and was drawing well before that. A fascination for art led her to explore the Sidhe Ruins near her home, where she made charcoal rubbings of the patterns carved into the walls. She came to believe that these drawings were not only intended to represnt magic, but were, in fact, magical. This was supported by the fact that, as she followed the traceries of the ancient drawings, her own artwork took on magical properties of its own… her drawings, when exposed to powerful magic, affected reality in unpredictable ways, and sometimes simply got up and walked off the page!
When she was seventeen, she travelled to Egypt, wanting to study the tomb paintings and compare them with her beloved Sidhe artwork. There she met Magister Rupert Anthony Pent, a teacher of archaeology from Lugenkuche College. She became his student and, when she came of age, his wife.
Mina and Rupert travelled the world together, Rupert making a study of the role of magic in ancient everyday life and Mina writing a paper intented to prove the connection between art and magic… a connection she believes to be infinitely stronger than that between magic and mathematics or technology.
Their union was happy but short-lived, as Rupert neglected one day to check the protective enchantments on his pith helmet and was eaten by a demon in the tomb of an ancient Mayan king, three years to the day after their wedding. Mina herself sustained severe burns to her arms, chest and stomach and lost her left hand while trying to rescue her husband.
Following Rupert's death, Mina returned to Falkensburg to recover from her injuries, and though she had planned to resume travelling the world after her convalescence, she found herself unwilling to travel alone and remained at the college as a teacher. Her left has has been replaced with a (still very experimental) steel construct made by the Mechanics. She permits their tinkering and adjusting and experimentation in return for pilfering rights to their pens and drafting paper.
Her lifelong love of art, which she calls "mankind's tangible attempt to make contact with the intangible", has expanded to include the work of modern artists. She hopes to discover, by studying everything that anyone has ever considered "art", the element which separates the magical from the mundane.
It is recommended that caution be exercised when opening a book she has doodled in… she has long since given up trying to be responsible for the doings of her accidental creations.