Legends of Belariath
Marren
Marren was born in a small wolven warrior village to a mated pair of wolven named Garrick and Marissa. Both Garrick and Marissa were warriors of their tribe, and they were elated to bring a healthy baby girl into the world. The young wolveness bore a brown pelt, except for her hands – her left hand was white, and her right was black.
Growing up, Marren learned to fight like all of the other children in the village, but she truly took an interest in the ways of the village healer. Her tribe had only one – an elder of the tribe – and Marren asked him to teach her the healing arts. Unfortunately, before she had much time to learn more than a little of her chosen avocation, the old healer passed away in his sleep, leaving Marren to figure out what she could without any formal training. Unable to learn the magic which accelerates and purifies the healing process without a teacher, she focused on learning how to bind wounds, set bones, and otherwise perform the more mundane tasks which a healer must know before the magic is fully effective.
When Marren had reached adulthood, she fell in love with and married Thorvald, one of the tribe's finest young warriors. While they mated and tried to conceive children, no amount of trying between the two of them was able to allow Marren to conceive. Enraged over the repeated failures to conceive and believing her to be barren, Thorvald decided that in order to be mated to a wolven who could bear him a child, he had to kill Marren. He took his knife and began to stab toward her heart through her left breast, but before he could get much more than the tip of the blade in, Marren fought him off and tore out his throat with her bare hands to save her own life. She still bears the scar from the attempt on her life as a grim souvenir of the man she believed loved her as she loved him.
A few years later, Marren's village was attacked by a rival tribe. No one living could remember the exact reason for the rivalry, but many in her tribe believed that their rivals coveted the land and hunting grounds upon which the village was built. In any case, a huge pack of warriors from the Storm Talons tribe descended upon the village in the dark of night, slaughtering men, women, and children indiscriminately, and setting the houses and other buildings to the torch as they raped, plundered, and pillaged the tiny hamlet.
Only Marren and one other member of her tribe – a teenaged girl named Anya – were able to escape the utter destruction of the village. As they ran into the woods, Marren was horrified to watch helplessly as the Storm Talons hunted young Anya down and cut her down where she stood. Fleeing deeper into the woods, Marren took full advantage of her excellent physical condition and managed to escape the stronger but slower male warriors. She ran for days, stopping to rest only when she was completely certain that she could conceal herself from her pursuers. Eventually, she reached the city of Nanthalion and the Lonely Inn.
For the first six months she was in Nanthalion, Marren found work at the Healing House practicing her art and learning more about the magical forms of healing. She thrived and excelled in her time there, and for the first time in a while, she truly felt alive and like she had a purpose. She also worked part time as a healer for House Kinslayer, but between the two jobs, she was devoted to her art.
Unfortunately, she began to notice things which led her to believe – erroneously, it turned out – that she was still being pursued by the Storm Talon warriors who had murdered everyone she'd held dear. Marren fled Nanthalion, running from what turned out to be phantoms, and settled in a human logging encampment for a time. She continued to practice her art there, doing what she could for the lumberjacks who were injured on the job.
About the time that she realized that she'd misinterpreted the signs she'd seen which led her to believe that the Storm Talons were still after her – almost a year later – Marren's paranoia borrowed trouble for her. The Storm Talons had largely forgotten about her, but the logging camp was right in their path when they decided to go on a killing spree again. A group of five wolven warriors decided to destroy the logging camp and kill the humans, presumably just for fun.
The lumberjacks really didn't stand a chance. They fought bravely, managing to kill two of the wolven before they were nearly all slaughtered to a man. Marren personally killed one of the Storm Talon warriors herself before the remaining two set fire to the encampment. Marren managed to rescue a young boy from the camp who'd been pretty badly injured, hiding the boy in the woods until she could build a litter to carry him to safety and to better healing than she could provide. When she reached a human town and got the boy to a healer, she stayed by his bedside for two weeks, hoping that he'd pull through, but she had to move on before she knew for sure.
Heading back to Nanthalion, Marren spent a week in a backwoods dwarven swamp-mining community before returning to the Healing House to resume her duties. Not long after she returned, she acquired a golden eagle as a familiar. The first time that she and the eagle went on a hunt together, they tracked a rabbit into a clearing in the woods not far from the Lonely Inn. That clearing was the backyard of Mithril Manor, where Marren met a shy, bookish, but well-built minotaur cleric-librarian by the name of Llewellyn Pathwalker. Llew invited Marren in for a drink, and after a bit of conversation – and some awkwardness on the part of the minotaur – Marren and Llew decided to have a bit of fun, and before long, they were fucking passionately. Llew bid her a fond farewell that afternoon, hoping that they might meet again, but it was not to be. More recently, Marren and Krylok Dreadpaw attended the Mockery Ball together, swapped into each other's bodies. After a rather... active... night, the pair decided to get engaged to be joined as mates.