Kalenda was born in a small hamlet of mostly scalehearts in southern Osirion. Her father was scaleheart, as was her brother. Her mother was human, as apparently was Kalenda. Kalenda learned from an early age that the weak were meant to serve the strong, and that nature's law was the only one that mattered. Her mother reinforced this by being overly weak to Kalenda's father, which told the scrawny girl that women served men. One day, when Kalenda was ten, her older brother took something from her. She foolishly gave in to anger, and tried to take it back. What ensued wasn't so much a fight as it was a slaughter. Kalenda's corpse was dumped into the river, as many were.
The corpse drifted downriver for a day and a half before it washed up in a thicket of reeds. There, something strange happened. The corpse began to breathe again. The girl awoke to the sight of two crocodiles standing motionless on either side of her. She sat up, and still they made no move toward her. As she contemplated them, and how she had gotten here, she felt herself changing. Her arms grew scales, and her head lengthened ever so slightly. Her eyes changed to yellow slitted ones, and her heart hardened. Her first word after returning to life was a name: Raziya.
For two years, the new-named Raziya learned to live again. She became adept at hunting and swimming, and she learned to harness her new abilities. After a time, she returned to the hamlet where she had grown up. When challenged by her brother, who didn't recognize her, she reached into the cold place in her heart and found strength there. She shifted, and she embraced the cold fury of the hunter. Her brother was her first humanoid kill. Shortly after dumping his body in the river, she went to her childhood home. She found her mother there, and slew her for her weakness. She vowed on her mother's cooling blood to kill all weakness within herself. She left the village that night.
Since then, she has endeavored to balance the cold killer instinct with the feeling that she might have survived had she known how to be strong. Raziya has no compunctions about killing those who deserve it, or about putting in their place those who are not strong enough (in her mind) to lead. She does, however, teach strength to those she feels would benefit from knowing how. Those who learn generally benefit from the example.
In her travels, she has also tried to study death in its myriad aspects. She still hasn't spoken about the things that she saw while on the other side, and nobody knows how it was she was brought back to life.
