Personality:
Ayoven is an average height, slim 18 year old woman with long dark brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and tribal designs painted on her body. She generally wears not much more than some strategically placed animal skins, perhaps heavy furs when the cold gets to be more than even a daughter of the North can handle. Most would consider her attractive, but this is the only charisma she has. Raised in the snowy north, partially by her father and partially by wolves, she hides wisdom and intelligence behind an innate savagery born of an intense survival instinct. She has known no company but that of the wild, and outsiders are viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, but she can speak and write as well as any other; after all, what use is the last child of a fallen kingdom if she cannot even read or write the language of their history? She is chaotic and free, and not afraid of spilling blood when the situation demands, but the great power of nature is balance, and just as a wolf will not hunt when it is not hungry, she will not kill when there is no reason.

Background:
The girl known as Ayoven breathed her first as her people breathed their last.  She was pulled from her mother’s womb as the great dragon Hyrdjuverk turned the warriors of the Venari tribe to icy statues and their homes to freezing drifts. Her crib was her father’s arms, holding her as tightly as he dared, stifling her screams with a jacket sleeve, running through snow covered branches in a mad dash to save the last remnants of the Venari tribe from total destruction. She never knew her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, her older brother and cousins. By the time her eyes opened, they were all gone, taken to the next world by a dragon’s icy breath.

Her father took her into the wilderness, calling upon all his training and experience to help them survive. He had been a Child of the Pack, an elite Venari warrior given power by ancient spirits and capable of surviving anything from raging battle to raging snowstorms. But the spirits could not help him here. He had sworn oaths, promised never to choose defeat over death, and though he had fled to save a life, the spirits would not aid an oathbreaker, no matter how honorable. He and his child were on their own.

But, the Venari way was to never submit, never give up. He may have fled battle, but his child, his daughter, the last fragment of a great people crumbled to dust, was something he would never flee. So he raised her, taught her all the ways of the Venari a veteran warrior could. He taught her to hunt, to fight, to survive. He made her strong and he made her ruthless: a Daughter of the Pack, in essence if not in name.

And there was something else, something he did not expect. Ayoven had a connection with wolves, an uncanny connection. When she was two he found her at a wolves den, frolicking with the cubs as if they were her own brothers and sisters. When she was five, he found her following the wolf packs, watching them with eyes that yearned for four legs and a coat of fur. When she was ten, she didn’t come back for nearly a week, and when he heard a vaguely human howl among the others, he knew that he was not the only one teaching his daughter the ways of the north.

And so was born a girl who was a mix of man and beast. She knew the words and legends of her people, the stories that, though frozen in their scrolls, were held within a mind that had heard them spoken for his entire life. She learned to write the language of runes that all Children, shamans as much as warriors, had to know, scratching out the symbols on pieces of bark and the hides of beasts, writing her own tales in the snows and dirt of the forest. But, encasing this intelligent mind was an exterior that, for its cunning and ferocity, might have contained a pure bred dire wolf as much as it contained a growing young woman. For every sacred weapon-dagger, hatchet, spear, and shield-she knew a dozen ways to kill a man, not even including the ways the wolves taught her: fangs, claws, and her own hardened strength.

For eighteen years she and her father survived, the last vestiges of their people. Then her father decided it was time that she have her final test. Every Child of the Pack had to take the life of a warrior, that their own spirit might be strengthened. Her father had taught her all that he could: it was time he make his final recompense, and again see her mother in the next world. So, Lítill was given a mission: go into the forest, carrying or wearing nothing but the four sacred weapons, track down her father, and with a single inerrant thrust, strike him down. That way he could die a warrior’s death, atoning to the spirits his cowardice, and she could gain the power of his spirit, and maybe someday rebuild their people.

Despite the freezing northern snows and her father’s skill at winter travel, a shivering and exhausted Ayoven found him, and with the courage of a warrior and the efficiency of a killer she did as she must. She showed no hesitation, nor fear. She didn’t even flinch as her spear blade met her father’s heart. As the light drained from the warrior’s eyes, he saw not a hint of weakness in his daughter’s gaze, and knew that he had made the right choice. In that moment, washed away forever was the girl, bathed in her father’s blood. Only the warrior, the hunter, the wolf remained.

Now Ayoven truly was the last of the Venari. But, she felt no fear, no loneliness; the wolves were her family, and with her father’s atonement, she began to hear the spirits voices for the first time in her life. Before she could learn their ways, however, they told her something that set her hackles to raising and her body to shivering.  Something was coming, something terrible, and the spirits said that the only way to stop it was to head south; for what reason, they did not say. But Ayoven did not need details. Whatever it was, she would stop it.

She was the last of the greatest tribe of the north, and by all that was sacred, it would not die with her.