Shadowbringers & Endwalker lore spoilers behind the cut
Born to the Viis of the First, in her brief thirty years there she grew up fast. She lived during the golden age of Ronka, long before the collapse, and served as a personal bodyguard to a high priestess of the King. She was born and raised there, trained in swordsmanship and magic, and was well regarded as a lethal fighter among her peers. She was good at her job, fond of her priestess, and taken completely by surprise the day she was torn from her own reality. The unwitting victim of a botched summoning by a very poor Black Mage who was attempting to reach into the 13th and had all their standards and points crossed, the summoning spell actually fired and the brief gap between worlds yielded not a voidsent in Thanalan, but a flash-blinded, nude, and memory-damaged leporine woman thrown from a gash in reality in southern Ilsabard. While that Black Mage stood around in the desert on the other side of the world wondering why nothing happened, the unconscious Viis woman was being scooped up and rushed indoors by an equally concerned and frightened Helion family matriarch.
Re'kaa does not know her birth name, nor much at all about her history aside from occasional muddled flashbacks to a large stone temple complex. According to her rescuers, she was in and out of consciousness for ten days before her aether was stabilized with the assistance of a traveling White Mage. She was offered the name Re'kaa by her rescuers and accepted it until such time as she might remember who she was, except that never came to pass. For thirty more years she remained with the Hrothgar, having traveled several times to the Golmore Jungle in search of answers only to be refused and cast out by the local Viera tribes as an outsider. All the while she was completely unaware that as decades passed on the Source, centuries blurred by on the First and the Kingdom of Ronka fell and was mostly lost to history.
She remained with her new people, her found people, having quickly re-acquainted herself with swords and magic as though her soul remembered them even if her memory did not. In the passing years she took to the paintbrush for her idle hours, learning not only Hrothgar traditional coat pattern painting and dyeing, but also taking up face painting, Henna-style inking, and skin art from passing Thavnarian travelers. She took the clan name, Asuvius, as her surname per local tradition, and remained until the rise of the Garlean empire and their expansion toward Eorzea. Knowing her adoptive people were guarded from incursion by the impassable mountains of northern Ilsabard, and not regarded as even worth conquering or conscripting by the empire, she realized she could do well to help the free nations fight occupation. Seen as suspicious by Doma and Hingashi alike, she took up with Thavnarian traders as a sellsword and an artist.
Eventually she was drawn to the "Jewel of the Desert", Ul'dah, by the promise of great international markets where she might ply her trades and fight the coming occupation. Instead she found corruption and abject poverty, gilded walls surrounded by battered camps of desperate refugees. With no buyers for her art and her funds running short, she once again took up the sword with all intention to make some coin as a Gladiator and return to the bustling markets of Radz-At-Han. The aether in Ul'dah was making her sick and causing strange flashes of memories that were not hers, and she was determined to leave the place. At least, that was the plan until the day she cut down several men harassing a peasant woman in the street and caught the eye of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.
What followed is a story well documented. The riots, the massacre and exile, the end of the Dragonsong War, the liberation of Doma, Ala Mhigo, and all of Gyr Abania. Still with all intention to return to Thavnair when all is over, she followed her new calling to the strange blinding world of Norvrandt. With her favorite sword, her best armor, and a pretty Henna pattern painted across her cheekbones she accepted the summoning and awoke in the strange violet forest of Lakeland.
Still, it seemed just another journey into untold destiny until the old flashbacks surged back the moment the kind Ronso gentleman at the Crystarium addressed her as a Viis. Still she fought on, gathering her Scion comrades until the fateful day in the Rak'tika Greatwood when she dove into Lake Tusi Mek'ta and found herself in the ruins of the temple she once served beneath the Fruit of the Protector. Laying her hand upon the final seal to be broken, she was greeted by the spirit of the high priestess she once protected and subsequently had her memories restored. She was under for far too long, emerging just as Y'shtola readied to call for aid, and collapsing in tears there at the water's edge as she recounted the tale. There by the lakeside she and the archon swore one another to secrecy. Smiling as she feigned ignorance to the hunters of Fanow, making no mention of why Re'kaa was able to open the Qitana Ravel from memory. How she could clear all the traps and puzzles as if they were child's play, and make her way through not only without a map or guide but so boldly as if she knew the place by heart.
Having fought her way through, barely survived the corruption of primordial light, collected the memories and crystals of Amaurot, she finds herself having averted calamity again. Only to have it come roaring back. To be nearly expelled from Sharlayan, fight off countless blasphemies, go to the end of the universe and back again, travel now to the 13th and give it a hard shove in the direction of light and balance, of salvation. Finally, finally she rests at ease in Radz-At-Han, penning a letter home to her adoptive people, to her family in Ilsabard that they may know she has found her homeland and her true people, had her memory restored. For once in such a long time she relaxes on the balcony, enjoying some fine Hannish cuisine with no thoughts of future battle. At least until a message comes in from Sharlayan, from Mistress Krile, going on about an Envoy to the city of Gold...