Ariane's teenage years possibly should have caused her more angst than they eventually did, beginning with a debilitating illness which left her permanently frail and continuing with her father being spirit-wracked (and then redeemed), and her mother losing faith in St John as a result of these incidents and others, and walking out on the family.
After spending her late teens working in the temple as a first aider and midwife, Ariane started to train as an alchemist, a career which she took to very quickly, but also very explosively when the combination of an unattended lantern and a somewhat exciting experiment resulted in her blowing a wall off the West Wing of the Alchemists' Guild at the start of 1287. Thrown out for appearance's sake, she found herself with a letter of recommendation from the Master of the Yorvik Guild and a strong suggestion that if she wanted to continue her career, she should do it somewhere a long way away. Her natural ability to be in the same place as trouble reared its head at this point, and she ended up in Grantabrugge.
Every city has an adventurers' tavern. It's the one where all the weird stuff happens, and the one where you go if you need someone to do something strange, unbelievable or downright dangerous. A lifetime of hanging around the Orc's Head in Yorvik with her father and brothers had mostly prepared Ariane for the Wessex Arms, and the way in which the patrons were able to defend the place against the Norscan attacks on the first night she drank there convinced her she was in the right place.
She's been there for three years now, and still enjoys it and might even claim she goes there to relax. She's lost all her idealism, but has somehow remained firmly on the side of Good despite her possession by a demon (exorcised), her falling in love with, and having to cope with the imprisonment and then death of, the infamous Brother Gilbert of Seeker, near-torture at the hands of the Children of the Light and the inevitable deaths (and occasional undeaths) of several good friends.
All that lot broke her a bit. Towards the end of 1288, the birth of Ariane and Gilbert's son John, some slightly unusual counselling from Sesqui and the arrival on the scene of an apprentice, Francis meant she started to mend a bit, or possibly was just kept too busy to think about being broken.
And then she ended up in a relationship with Francis, and was named a Master Alchemist by the Guild, and things started to look up a bit. She mended. She found herself able to talk to Children of the Light again, though she still shakes a bit when there's a Hand nearby.
On May 12th 1289, Ariane and Francis got married. Their wedding was attended by St John himself, who blessed them personally, and Spiritually Awakened Ariane, who had finally given up being stubborn about it. She didn't tell the temple though, feeling that it's an intensely private matter that she didn't want to discuss with certain of the high-ups in the Temple whose policies she... doesn't entirely agree with. So she kept it secret, telling only her family and close friends.
Then followed a quiet few months of approximate stability, by which I mean Ariane working hard in the Alchemists' Guild and even harder in the Temple (free time? Um, that's what you do on Friday nights in the Arms, isn't it?) followed by the birth of her second son, James, in January of 1290. Life just got even *more* frantic, but she loves it really, and thrives on stress.
Of course, as some people noticed, she cast a miracle in the bar on Friday. So even though there were fewer remarks made than she was expecting, she's decided to come clean. It's going to get interesting...