nature is not human hearted
Born in the age of gods and men, when mortals worshiped thunder and fought like each day was their last, Mareta earned the moniker of Spiritbane when she was only sixteen, when an illness none had survived could not claim her life. She trained with sword, bow, spear, and axe, though she found that a one-handed blade was what she favored quite quickly. By twenty-three, she was known among her peers as Stormsword, for her quick, furious strikes and her unbridled fury - but many still called her Spiritbane.
She married at twenty-four, but she and her husband were not blessed with children before she met the fate that holds her to this day. In the forests near the village lived a woman few had seen in their lives, called in the stories mothers told their children the Mourning Maid, who was said to be a spirit of the woods themselves. Mareta entered the woods to hunt for the next morning's meal, and found herself in the presence of the Maid, who saw in Mareta something of herself.
"You, I will give this life," she said with a voice like crackling leaves. Mareta did not recall the events of that night clearly; all she remembered was the fear that she would not be seen again.
Six centuries passed, in which Mareta walked the same woods. She watched her village razed to the ground, and could do nothing about it without revealing herself. She found herself growing anxious, locked down as she was to those same woods. One night, she sought to commune with the earth itself - and where those before had failed, Mareta Spiritbane succeeded. From that night on, she no longer felt trapped in the same place, locked in limbo and unable to move on. The whole earth was her home, her territory, and she would explore it.
One hundred years ago, she had a vision. The earth was growing ill from humanity's industrialization. The vision left her in a state between awareness and torpor, and in just enough of an unaware state that an inept hunter put a stake through her heart. She is newly awoken, hungry and lost...