Damien was born with his twin brother Lucedio to a rich pureblood parents, Adrik and Alona Thorne. As babies his parents used to gush over the twins, how they would give them a strong magical lineage. However as time went by, Lucedio started to show vast magical prowess, where Damien showed nothing. His parents started to croon over Lucedio, but Damien often fell by the wayside, believed to be a squib. Lucedio grew to be sick around the age of three, coming down with a severe illness. Their parents were told he wouldn't live to see his fourth birthday.

Adrik and Alona tried everything they could to save him, even searching for old dark rituals. Anything that could save their 'darling heir'. Nothing seemed to work, and months later he was declared dead. Their anger and spite turned towards Damien. After a year, they seemed to have enough of Damien and at the age of four he was abandoned by his parents. He was found by a policeman not long after, who brought him to social services. He was quickly put in foster care, which didn't last too long. Over the next several years, he bounced from foster family to foster family. His early years he had high hope for the system, wanting to find a family he could stay with, his memories of his actual family lost at this point.

However, it became quickly apparent that most of his foster families wouldn't last long. His longest in the early years being a couple of months. His views on the foster system changed and he began running away from his various families, not wanting to stay with people who wouldn't care about him. He started to get this gut feeling that maybe his real family was out there, that maybe he could find them and that he could be happy all the time. As the years went by, this feeling remained but he started to realize that all probability was they were dead.

He was brought into the schooling system as soon as he was taken in, but with his home shifting, he was moved from school to school depending on what school was closer. He tried to make friends fairly early on and manage to keep some good ones for a while, until he was moved again. After several moves, Damien simply stopped trying to make friends as it seemed too difficult to keep a friend.

He started to collect books to learn about history at the age of eight, at first it was a way to try to find his own family history, which didn't turn up much luck as his surname was seemingly common. Eventually his reading habits started to involve more than just history and he started finding interest in science and mathematics. He even perused the odd cookbook every now and then.

His first known encounter with magic came about when he was nine. His foster family had contacted social services and requested that Damien be moved to another family. He found himself angered by this, and when social services arrived to move him, Damien ran for the door. All of a sudden, the doors and windows flew open as part of his need to escape and leave. His family seemed shocked, but he didn't linger to see their reaction. As he rounded the corner of the front door, he heard the social worker mutter something about a strange gust of wind, perhaps a storm coming or some sort. He managed to evade them for a week before he was found and brought to another family.

His most recent family however, got the shock of their lives when a strange professor arrived at their house with a letter. The professor explained that Damien was a 'Wizard' and that he had been accepted to a school designed to teach magic. As he explained the wizarding world, Damien grew more and more fascinated and after their visit to Diagon Alley, he studied almost every book he had, and found himself especially interested in potions. He could not wait for Hogwarts.