Growing up on a remote Kaladeshi estate as a noble child, he began to display his powers as a storm wielder at a young age. As a baby, his laughter brought a beautiful drizzle with rainbows bouncing between the clouds… his screams brought small spikes of lightning and gurgles of thunder. No one in the palace had ever seen or heard of anyone so powerful with weather and especially lightning at such a young age, and they began every attempt to control and increase his powers by training him rigorously.
He was under a strict routine every day, and kept under a watchful eye. By the age of 10, he could control the weather around the palace and the adjacent villages, bringing rain of any level of intensity, from a light drizzle to a roaring downpour, and the townsfolk began to revere him as a local Storm God. They came to the palace to leave offerings of coin, food and treasures, asking him to control the weather according to the needs of the seasonal crops. The village flourished with steady rain every season increasing their crop yields for many years. All the while his royal family dealt with the shadowy Consulate, bribing them using the offerings left to the young Storm God Ral Zarek, so as not to reveal the secret of their immensely powerful son to the rest of Kaladesh. The Consulate continued to threaten the royal family as he got older; they wanted to take him away to be examined and investigated, to figure out the source of his powers, and how he could so freely draw on the Aether around him. Eventually, Ral’s grip on his powers slipped with the onset of puberty. Finally, when Ral was a teenager at the age of 16, he lost control over his emotions, plunging into depression in response to the constant pressure and expectations surrounding his Godlike status. An endless storm began to wash over the village, drowning crops, causing floods and wreaking total havoc on all its inhabitants for several months. Ral was terrified and confused but he didn’t know how he was causing it anymore, and tried as hard as he could to stop it. His family began making threats. If he could not reverse the storm, they would turn him into the Consulate, thinking all the while that he was doing it on purpose spitefully, as a response for being used as a tool for the village and the Palace’s profit all these years. The Consulate threatened to take him and confine him. Villagers were breaking down the palace walls as many others were swept away by the storms, screaming. One night his family converged on him, tying him down like an animal and threatening to kill him to end the madness of the torrential, ravenous lightning storm that had lasted for months. As his father lowered the blade to his throat, his spark ignited as the fear and pressure crashed down around him and he Planeswalked to Ravnica, following a path through the Blind Eternities that lead him to safety.