Svetlana of the Stoneshaper clan made a mistake. She fell for the sweet, honeyed words of a boy from a rival clan. When he found out she was pregnant, he couldn't drop her quick enough. The same is true of her family. For the shame of bearing the child of a rival clan, Svetlana was cast out onto the streets. She found refuge in one of the poorer sections of Highhelm and made her living much as one might expect. She named her daughter Aetherna, after the dwarvish word for "fool's gold" as a reminder that the beauty of love could be a deadly trap.
Live wasn't easy for Aetherna. The streets were tough and every moment was a struggle for survival. She received her first beat down at age five, when she tried to take an apple from a vendor. That day, Aetherna learned an important lesson: you run, you fight, or you die. And she sure as hell wasn't going to run or die.
By the time most young women were noticing boys, Aetherna was noticing them, too. They were the ones sulking about how they got their asses kicked by a girl. A pit fighter named Harsk who was "visiting" Aetherna's mother noticed her potential at that age and agreed to train her. Aetherna spent the next phase of her life learning how to use her fists and her feet, her elbows and her knees and her whole body as a weapon. She's heard there are those who follow the path of the unarmed fighter as a spiritual one. Her? She just wants to survive, beat the next guy down and win the fight.
Just after she reached adulthood, Aetherna lost her mother to a wasting disease. There was nothing to tie her to either the dwarven city or the whole damn dwarven race so, when Harsk offered to take her away from the city and to distant lands where she could learn new fighting techniques and earn more gold, she accepted, eagerly.
Her last fight was interesting. Just her and a big, nasty half-orc. He had a spiked mace and a buckler. She had just her fists. He got her to the ground, bleeding and broken. He raised his mace down to deliver the killing blow. Something inside of her snapped. She reached up, grabbed his buckler, wrenched it from his hands and used it to deflect the blow.
Then she beat him to death with the damn thing. After the fight, she kept it.
