The Mongrel was abandoned in the desert as a child to die of exposure, but instead the desert adopted him. People of the nearby civilized settlements, when they caught sight of him at all, referred to him as "Mongrel" and so that became the name he went by.
The Mongrel spent his early teens as a semi-accepted member of a velociraptor pack, and one of his adopted brothers has been with him ever since. Velociraptors don't give each-other names, and so the Mongrel's doesn't have one. When necessary, he refers to the creature as "velociraptor" and rare is the situation where people don't know which one he means.
Haleen was the only member of civilized society who was ever kind to the Mongrel, and she was the one who taught him to speak common (although he still has a pronounced Abyssal accent) and was instrumental in his eventual semi-integration into human society. She acted as something of a mother figure to him, and was the closest thing the Mongrel ever had to family.
Mongrel had always had strange abilities related to his connection with the desert, but Haleen encouraged him to develop them and then eventually seek out other druids for instruction. Becoming a druid gave the Mongrel a place in the world like none he had ever known before.
When Haleen disappeared, finding her consumed the Mongrels every waking moment. She is his only connection to the human world and he will stop at nothing to find her.
