Got a new D&D character! So, of course, I wrote out her backstory. Characters are my own.

The hot sun bore down above them, warming the fur on their backs. Savannah plains reflected the heat off the earth, caught the light breeze as it whispered through the thick grasses, and wove scents of dust, sweat, boiling stew, and the crackling smoke of the encampment’s fire. Massani stood by the tanning racks, where she went about scraping fat off the most recent hide with a long, stone blade. Sweat dripped from her forehead. Biting flies nipped at her legs before her tail swatted them away. As the last of the oliphaunt’s fat slid off into the wooden bowl, she stepped back and wiped her forehead across her forearm. 

“You work those quite well, Massani,” said a voice from behind. Massani turned to see a bhastan with a full, ivory mane spilling down her white chest. Her flesh bore scars from the four hard decades as the final survivor of the clan’s leading Pride. She wore leather clothing Massani crafted a season before: a hide jacket with a hood, long trousers, and working gloves. The lioness’ skin bore a certain sensitivity to the sunlight, especially where the fur thinned around her scars. 

“Thank you, Matriarch,” Massani said with a dip of her snout. “It seems the latest pieces are serving you well.”

“They are,” Matriarch said, looking to Massani’s work. The oliphaunt’s leather stretched several feet in all directions. “What will this one be?” 

“We’re in need of more tents,” Massani replied. “The rainy season is fast approaching.”

“Ah, always thinking ahead,” Matriarch said, patting the younger lioness’ shoulder with a toothy grin. “Soon enough, we’ll have to have you grow out your mane.” 

Massani blinked. “My mane, Matriarch?” 

“You have reached your third decade, Massani.”

“But I have done no great feats,” Massani protested. “I am no leader of the clan.” 

Matriarch laughed. “Young bhastan, are you truly going to sell yourself so short? It is because of you we have any tents at all.” Matriarch gestured around the meager camp, where oliphaunt hides arched across pikes to be used as tents easily put up, and easily torn down. Ten of them sat in total around the center firepit, though they once had a clan of high twenties. 

“Matriarch!” The two lionesses turned towards the voice. A young bhastan with a golden pelt, a hide vest crafted by Massani’s two hands, and a loincloth, jogged up to them with a large grin. “The hunters are back!” 

“At last,” Matriarch breathed. “Come, Massani. Let us see what they caught.” 

Massani nodded. She wiped her blade off on her bare leg, smearing gore against aurelian hairs, then set it next to the bowl of fat. She walked through the encampment, bare, padded toes pressing firmly into the hardened earth. Long grasses circled the clearing, spilling upwards of four feet tall, with mangled bushes varying the landscape wherever they could find sure footing. It was a fine place to hunt, but the scarce water and scarcer shade wore on the clan’s constitutions. 

As she strode past the firepit, she smiled and nodded to the bhastan tending to it, his thick, dark mane laced with twenty-two braids. One for each family member they lost in the last two seasons. The scar across his left eye rendered him half blind, but he spotted her anyway and smiled in return. 

There were eighteen of them left, in total. All but the youngest, who had not been old enough to partake in the battle, were riddled in scars. Massani herself bore the weight of several battles with rival clans and of prey that fought back. Claw marks tore across her chest and beneath her left eye. Teeth marks punctured her left forearm and the back of her neck, where two lion pets dug their fangs into her during a fight for territory. A large stab wound on her left abdomen where a spear dug into her, along with a scar the length of her right forearm were gifted from the last battle: a battle with a small band of human hunters who attacked one member of their hunting party, without realizing there were seven of them. The four humans armed with metal sticks did bleed several of the clan,  but it was her family’s claws that stole their lives away. 

Four of the eight hunters were their youngest, who bore no scars upon their pelts. Instead, today they bathed in antelope blood, two of the prey animal hauled along by the hunting party. Considering how often hunts ended in failure, two successes on a single trip was enough to be celebrated. Two successes with half of the hunting party being young and untested? It seemed to be a miracle. 

“You have done well!” Matriarch chimed. She spread her arms and beamed. “Thank you all for providing for the clan.”

Massani took one of the antelopes to skin and process while the hunters dragged their weary bodies towards the center of camp. They dropped to their rears and bellies, with a few of the clan offering them waterskins to sedate their thirst. No matter how used to it as they were, heat still had a way of taking the strength from even the most hardened bhastan. 

With eight of the clan resting, Massani and Uma–a young apprentice perhaps two decades old–stripped the prey of their antlers and hooves, took their hides for Massani to work on later, cut the meat, and removed the organs. Sweat spilled down Massani’s neck and dehydration began to make her hands unsteady. With a steadying breath, she pressed on. There would be water enough when night fell, and it proved easier to travel to the nearest river. Besides, if Massani stopped now, the work would not be finished. She and Uma were all the clan had, and even Uma could be a liability at times. On multiple occasions, Massani reached over to stop the young bhastan from stabbing her dagger too deep and puncturing the liver. 

Dusk began to fall upon Moravia. Massani lifted a flank of meat onto her shoulder and stood, her body heavy with weariness, and turned towards the fire to deliver it to the chef, the bhastan with braids she nodded to earlier that day. The sunset bled across the horizon. A roar of anguish shattered the serenity of the tired camp.

Massani froze. Around the fire, young Haji fell backwards, an arrow sticking out of his eye. 

All leapt to their feet, work abandoned, exhaustion disregarded. Massani knew her role in the clan and dashed towards the direction the arrow had come from, abandoning the meat on the dusty ground, following after a few of her maned clan members. From the tall grass around them, hunters emerged, dressed in thick armor and armed with spears and nets and shields. The first threw a large chain net over Ode, pinning the old bhastan to the ground, while Kalifa rolled out of the way. As she rose, a spear launched through the air, piercing her right foot and pinning her to the ground. A cry rose up, before a quick slash of a knife lacerated her throat. 

Massani tackled the offender: a lithe human with piercing blue eyes. She pinned him, restricting his movement, and locked her jaws around his exposed throat. She tore it out with a twitch of her mouth, spat the meat onto the ground. She stood, leaving him to gurgle and choke and spasm. Her eyes caught the flash of white. The Matriarch fell with a spear angled upwards in her jaws. 

Massani screamed, tears biting her eyes as she charged the offender, leaping upon the human and grasping him around the waist. She threw him to the ground and raked her claws against his armor-covered chest before digging her fangs into his skull and squeezing. 

Bone groaned as the hunter flailed and struggled to shove Massani away, grasping for his weapon–anything to stab her with. As his skull gave way, she watched as more nets fell upon her weary clan. She could smell none of her assailants. She did not even hear them approach. 

Her eyes spotted movement. The hunter below her stopped moving as brain oozed from the holes in his shattered cranium. She sat up, blood and drool trialing from her lips. There was a mage, just on the other side of a tent. Magic would have hidden them. Magic allowed her clan’s death.

Massani’s fur bristled, a growl rumbling from her throat. She leapt off the carcass of her victim and charged the mage. Cloth wrapped their face and body, making the target nearly unidentifiable. But she saw those piercing orange eyes, like a sunset above a fire-soaked horizon. Massani leapt, talons outstretched.

And a blade cut her throat.

The bhastan hit the dust hard, skidding across the ground as her life bled from her second mouth. She struggled to shove a hand against it, to stem the bleeding. A foot kicked her onto her back. The mage stood nearby, clutching their robes in shock. A half-orc loomed above Massani, a dagger dripping crimson in hand. He sneered down at her.

Words spilled from her mouth she could not grasp. He pointed the blade at her, blood splattering her pelt as she struggled to breathe. The taste of iron filled her mouth. The mage spoke back, their voice sing-song and several octaves higher than Massani’s. As consciousness slipped from Massani’s grasp, two words stained her mind: Anderim, a word she recognized as the name of the southern land; and Gravisford, which was repeated three times, and appeared to Massani’s dying mind, as important.

The half-orc nudged her with his foot once more. Her lids closed partially. She burned his face into her mind, so she might curse him in the afterlife. Curse him and the mage at his left. A single tusk poke up from the right side of his mouth, and black hair formed a knot at the top of his skull. Silver eyes pierced Massani, watched as her last breaths left her chest. And the mage, wrapped in muddy brown cloth with apricot eyes, closed their eyes, let out a sigh, and walked away. 

Massani’s eyes vision darkened. She struggled to keep her hand upon her throat, but strength fled her limbs and, eventually, she slipped into nothingness.

A raspy gasp startled Massani from her slumber. Her eyes flew open and her body burned with pain. She touched her throat to find moisture staining her fur. The night loomed with darkness overhead, the stars casting a dim glow upon the land. She pushed her hand to her neck and looked around, chest heaving, shallow breaths coming in the way of choking, audible and wet inhales. Home spread out around her as a skeleton of warmth and comfort. The grass border sat above her where she lay, and the tents nearby sat erect. The crackling of the night’s fire still chirped and snapped nearby. With a heave, Massani used one hand to shove herself slowly into a sitting position, and flood of new blood staining her left paw. Her eyes lifted to the flames, now smoldering low within the pit, and witnessed the bare bodies that lay around it. 

Tears burned her vision as she dragged herself to them. Several of her scarred siblings without manes lay with gashes across their chests, with spears through their hearts. But the worst were those she could not fully distinguish. The ones who had been skinned, and now lay as nothing more than bloody husks, their souls stolen from them. 

Massani shakily drew herself to one, who lay in the pile beside the fire, with high cheekbones, with eyes missing, teeth and talons stolen. She lay down beside the clan member, beside her family, and wept. She wept until sleep found her again. And when she woke a second time, only hours later, she took that as a sign. Unlike their gods, she would not die. She reached into the smoldering fire pit, plucked a rock from its midst with her talons, and pressed it against her neck.

Each nerve screamed against the torture, their pain renewed with startling vigor. Massani clenched her teeth against it, the oily, fatty smoke spilling from her wound staining the insides of her nostrils with the scent of her own flesh burning. It slicked her fur with its acrid, salty flavor. It coated her bones. When the rock cooled, she fetched another, and another, until the wound in her neck sealed. Then she rested, waited for the agony to fade, and pushed herself to her feet. Her head spun, lightheaded from the blood loss, from dehydration, from hunger. But she had to release the spirits of her family. 

She fetched grass, wood, flint and stone. She built a bonfire, and one by one, she added her loved ones’ bodies to the consuming flames. As ash spilled into the night sky, Massani clasped her hands together, and began to speak a prayer.

Nothing came from her throat. Hoarseness in a single note, raw pain like the blade digging into her flesh all over again. She touched her neck, ensured she had not broken through the burn, and tried again. Still, nothing. She grimaced. She needed to give her body time to rest. There was damage to her throat, it should have been obvious she would not be able to use her voice until she recovered. She bowed her head, and willed the prayers into existence instead. 

Eight bodies lay without their pelts, dooming their souls to being trapped on this plane until fire took them. One of them was the Matriarch, and Massani thought it to be the one without eyes or teeth or talons. She dragged them into the fire, committing their names, their faces, the shade of their fur to her memory. The Matriarch, with ivory fur and a thick mane; Haji, the youngest with an unscarred pelt; Uma, bearing only a single scar upon her hand, with golden fur that darkened by her feet; Davu, unscarred, his fur the color of a dust storm; Kojo, who bore a scar across his left ear, and wore a dark, muddy pelt; Chidi, the second youngest, unscarred with fur the color of disturbed waters, brown stirring across his otherwise light pelt; Ode, who bore a deep black mane and had been trapped beneath the iron nets; and Shaka, the maned lion blinded in his left eye, with braids in his dark brown mane. 

She sat by the fire for a while, serving as witness to her family’s passage into the afterlife. Then she fetched supplies from a nearby tent, gathering herbs for her neck, which she crushed together, placed into a bandage, and tied around her throat. She took a hide backpack and filled it with what she found necessary: a gourd of water, dried meat, bandages and herbal medicine, her stone dagger, flint and a whetstone. As she stepped out of the tent, she looked to the fire once more. Her foot landed upon something hard, and she peered down. Ode’s stones, the ones he had used within his braids. She knelt down and picked the few she could find up off the ground. She took a breath. And she followed the tracks leading out of her home and towards the coast.