The Present
Ceylon had known nothing of what it meant to be Kept by men, until the day the Prince of Storms hurled his tether about her throat. Master Raoul Tonerre stumbled upon the Vila quite incidentally, but it was not an opportunity wasted. Capturing the Elemental had been quite an affair, and the creature was more feral than human by the time he managed to rein her power into check. But with calm came the inevitable curiosity: who was this Man capable of containing her? By time and action, he explained her new place in this unlikely world, and the purpose to which she would be pressed. Enslavement was a concept foreign to the Vila, and its customary specifics that so many slaves knew by rote and heart were foreign to her wild sensibilities.
But the Vila are creatures of an inordinately vast curiosity. For the sake of the Experience, they are willing to tolerate more than most can comfortably consider in a lifetime, and she took to this new task with a strange sort of relish. It was different, and new, and while she continued to progressively fumble in her duties as she came to understand her own purpose, she was a startlingly fast study, and rather addictively dedicated to pleasing. It was only once Raoul believed her nearing perfection that, in what many may have considered a bold and bizarre move, he returned her to the Markets.
Unowned and once again fitful, she was nevertheless still indellibly tethered to the man that had broken her from Sea and Sky, his pawn in a world where - more often than not - the most one could hope to do was play the game. And so the Vila watched and waited for a Master sufficiently brazen to take a taste of lightning beneath his collar.