I ran away from my human mother Nalin right when I was old enough to, and went out to find my father, Hunabec Marmu. From she told me, he killed a bunch of bandits who kidnapped her, and soon after, they made me. She went back home to Sothis, but her family drove her out when my tusks first grew. She raised me on the outskirts of a little farming town on the Sphinx, and was never quiet about her resentment and shame over me and the life she could have had if I never got born. She always said her family was rich and noble, but it doesn't matter who the hell they were. She didn't want me, and they sure as hell don't. They can all rot.
So when time came to leave, I had to find my father's clan. She always spoke of him with respect and reverence – talked of him as a powerful warrior-shaman of power, of confidence and honor. I suppose it was a hell of a lucky stroke that he and the Marmu clan found me after a week of wandering alone in the wild, knowing nothing but what he looked like when my mother knew him. When he learned who I was, he took me in on the condition that I was to train under him as a Shaman.
He was a brutal teacher, and not a day passed that I wasn't aching and exhausted from his training. He never called me his daughter, never showed any affection or emotional attachment to me, never congratulated or praised me, never mentioned my mother. But he was never unfair or unreasonable to me, he always encouraged me to be independent and honorable, and he forced me to become strong.
The day I first started to cast spells, he said nothing different from normal, and ran me every bit as hard as he always did. When I slept that night, he took me into the wild, woke me, gave me an axe and some armor, and told me to leave – said, “A shaman don't spend her whole damn life in one spot. Go out and fight out in the world and come back when you learn something.”
