Maxime is the unsolicited result of an encounter between a Chelish colonialist and a Mwangi girl. Though obviously of mixed blood, the child did find a home among the tribe and grew to the onset of puberty with little more than a hint of her mixed heritage.
With her first blooding her body awakened to more than it was accustomed to. A feral, bestial nature revealed itself that neither the girl nor the tribe and its shaman could cope with. The girl was not killed outright, as such would release the aktu, the evil inside her; instead she was cast from the tribe - banished - and with her the evil spirit that had taken possession of her.
The girl survived the jungle. Spending the next ten years fending for herself - with little human contact. Over the course of years she became a primal spirit to the Mwangi tribes in the delta she frequented: rarely seen, unnaturally beautiful, and often in or near sites of ruins - where spirits lived. She became known as Sikutku - She Who Hunts At Dawn - as she was almost never sighted at other times of the day.
After more than a decade of the girl's drifting in the jungle, the lore of her reached even Kalabuto. It became a bit of a colonialist sport to hunt for this "legendary jungle spirit" - and it took just short of six years for the girl - now a woman - to be caught by one Lord Maximus Rachmanov. Named after her captor, Maxime was displayed and brandished in her "natural feral beauty as when the beast was caught", that is to say naked, she was exhibited throughout Sargava and parts of Cheliax.
On the return voyage to Sargava Maxime finally caught a lull in her guard, ripping one guard's throat open with her bare hands and killing the other with his own dagger. At the time nobody dared approach her, then as more days passed Maxime became a quiet fixture of the ship. People saw her change from a beast to merely a human, barring her teeth only when startled or when approached uninvited.
