Abram is the son of a dock worker, refugees from Skovlan when the Empire first went to war against the island nation. His parents home port of Havelov was hit hard and quickly taken, his parents both arriving on the same ship and heading to Dusklov for shelter and a chance at something new away from the destruction of their home.
A poor, immigrant family that arrived with nothing to call their own, his parents were betrothed to one another and struggled everyday to make their own way. Three miscarriages came and went, with the fourth one being a small and frail child that would grow up to be the terror known as Abram.
Being from Skovlan, Abram was raised even under the foot of his fellow destitute. Seen as a thief of jobs and opportunity, his father's eagerness to provide was taken advantage of again and again and his mother ended up working in Silkshore as a whore to make ends meet. These trades, one being the lowest of the low and his mother being a common streetwalker, led to a rough life for Abram. Picked on, shoved about, the fellow children demanded the young boy learn his place. Yet no matter how many there were, how big they were, Abram had the courage (or lacked the common sense) to back down. He came back every day with new wounds, new bruises, his eyes were like raccoons most of his early life. Yet with every fight, he learned a little more of the streets, how to take a punch, and how to make a man bleed.
At the age of ten, Abram's life changed when one of his fights was noticed by a member of the Van Dorf Crime Family. Seeing the young boy's brutality as he gouged one boy four years his senior's eye while biting the hand of another one hard enough to make him bleed, the man named Kris broke up the fight and took him aside. He could see the potential, the chance for this one to be more than just some dock worker or punk on the street, and so he was taken underneath the criminal's wing.
Abram truly began to learn the lessons of the street; how to bully and terrify others into doing what you want, when to use honey instead of vinegar, and how wealth equaled power. He watched nobles treat Kris as a peer rather than a commoner, saw trained killers be terrified by his presence, and he quickly took after him as one of his enforcers. Abram's home life and his chosen career gave him a love of bloodlust that was hard to quench and easy to enjoy, the life of a pit fighter came easily to him when he wasn't breaking legs for the Van Dorf Family.
Yet fate was cruel and Kris ran afoul of the wrong individuals, looked for too much power. His life ended in a brothel, poisoned by a coward and left to bloat in one of the many canals. With his mentor dead and his way into the Van Dorf Family gone, Abram realized that they’d never accept a stranger without a good word into the real family. He wanted more than to be just some thug, he wanted it all; riches, power, fear, women. So the man nicknamed “Guts” by the late Kris Van Dorf roams the docks and fighting pits; breaking jaws, doing oddjobs, and looking for a crew worthy enough to have a vicious animal like himself in it.
