Catsulek’s life has not been a happy one and it is only now - in madness - she seems to have found any joy in it. Given past events, it is understandable as to how a gentle child could grow so twisted.

She was born under a blood moon to simple human folk in one of the slums at the edge of Southrot. They were horrified that their daughter was born a wyrd and so, from birth, kept her in the basement hidden from all human eyes. Because of her wings and feline aspect, and the fact her parents thought they had been cursed for their baby to be a mutate, she was called Catsulek (literally means cat-devil). Despite her ?imprisonment? Catsulek was not a bad child and was actually of a sweet and gentle nature.

She had a sister who was a normal human and the two got along fine, though Beya was not permitted to speak of Catsulek’s existence outside the house. At first her parents treated her well but, ever plagued by the fact his first daughter was an aberration of nature her father who had ever been a fan of drink slipped steadily into alcoholism and became a changed man. He began to beat his wife and daughters. The violence escalated until one terrible night, in a blind rage of the sort only ever fuelled by alcohol, he shoved Beya down the open hatch into the basement. The fall broke her neck.

The beatings stopped for a time but still Catsulek, only about seven winters old, and her mother now lived in terror of the ogre that was no longer the man they had known. When she was old enough to understand her parents’ desire for secrecy about her ‘affliction’, Catsulek began to go out with her mother to run errands, wrapped in a thick hooded cloak to disguise her appearance. The beatings began again as her father’s mourning for Beya turned into hatred for his wyrd child and he blamed her for Beya’s death. Catsulek became inseparable from her mother and as she grew wise enough to understand why he was so cruel a seed of hatred was planted in her innocent heart. Her life as it had been up until now was ended in the space of a day.

Drunk as usual, and in a particularly bad mood having lost at his gambling, her father had come back from the bars and begun to attack his wife with unusual vigour. Seeing the blood and hearing the heart-rending screams, something snapped in Catsulek and with a feral roar and a show of surprising strength for a girl of only twelve winters she drove him off her stricken mother, attacking him with her claws. Shocked and disorientated he ran upstairs and shut himself in his room, leaving mother and daughter alone for the night. He did not appear the next day so the two went about their business the usual way, but neither dared mention Catsulek’s act of the previous night.

It was on their way back from Southrot’s large central market that the awful thing happened. A fight had broken out in one of the taverns on their route home, and as they passed the violence spilled out into the street around them. Catsulek and her mother and were caught helplessly in the midst of the brawl between several orcs, a group of humans, a strange figure in black with a long blue lizardlike tail some rattikin and a frightful winged creature she later learned to be a dracosvulf and could only flatten themselves against a wall with her mother stood protectively before her daughter. One of the combatants, the black clad, blue-scaled one, noticed their plight and did his best to protect them, but as the fight drew to its bloody close, the axe-wielding dracosvulf felled a man armed with a crossbow. In the human’s death spasm he loosed one final bolt; the bolt that pierced her mother’s heart. The fight ended when the town guard arrived and the combatants fled. In terror, Catsulek ran too.

Forgetting about the incident with her father the previous night, Catsulek tried to run straight home but became lost and arrived several hours later. By now her father had already heard the bad news. At first it seemed no one was in, but as she came through the door she saw her father sitting with some strange men who looked to be northerners. Some words were spoken that she did not understand and then someone stuck her from behind with a blunt object, knocking her out.

When she awoke she was many hundreds of miles from home… she could only assume she had been kept unconscious with drugs for the long journey as she had woken up to find herself in the vast metropolis of Fortune City, the heart of the Empire. But for the next few years she was not to see the city for she was a prisoner; her father had sold his wyrd daughter to one of the harbour’s more upmarket brothels to be an ‘exotic’ prostitute. Over the next years of abuse and brutality the only person even close to being a friend was a hssaar girl who taught her the ways of her dark goddess Anshu. Slowly growing more and more wild Catsulek made many escape attempts, suffering horrible punishment each time she failed, until one stormy night she was driven to murder, killing the guard who had caught her and escaping into the darkness. From her old companion’s teachings she managed to get in touch with the underground Anshu cult in the city’s rotten underground and found a home there. Once she was recovered from her ordeal she joined the illegal Assassin’s Guild, absorbing all she could learn in the ways of death. She was thrown out eventually for killing fellow students but by now she had become the best the Guild had ever seen – save for the one known as Darkclaw but then he had never trained under the auspices of the Guild.

Once she felt her skills to be sufficient, she began to take on contracts, travelling first to Southrot to kill her father and then to build a fearsome reputation to match the meaning of her name. She quickly became infamous for the fact that she only ever accepts contracts to kill men, not women. Her acts of death are often grisly affairs and there are rumours of her having strange perversions for the corpses of her mutilated victims.

Besides the brief and deadly vendetta against her father, Catsulek has also sworn revenge for the death of her mother and still seeks the brawlers from that night, all of whom she blames for the accident – many of the survivors of that fight are now dead at her hands but some still elude her. Catsulek’s worst enemy, besides the Assassin’s Guild who want her dead, is Darkclaw. He is her greatest rival and she envies the reputation he has.