Fiona “Dead-Eye” Stuttgart – Harpoon Marksman

A Baltian woman raised in the sandstone blocks of Sudd Tohst’s glamorous city of Torish Istrath. Fiona was often prized as a beauty in her youth, the daughter of an illustrious merchant and jeweler who afforded his family a life of gold and lavish expenses, a far cry from the wretched street dwellers who lived in the shadow of their palace. Fiona had known little hardship as a child, until suddenly she knew nothing but it. When Sultan Hakim declared her father a conspirator against the crown and a supporter of Hinatal, the lives of the Stuggart family ended. Her father, mother and brothers were publicly executed, with Fiona and her sisters sold into slavery.

She was purchased by a captain of a whaling vessel as a wench to serve the crew their food and drink. While sailing through the isles of Ukrondia, the vessel was beset by a Leviathan, tearing the vessel asunder and slaughtering the crew in the water. Fiona was not willing to see her life end in chains, however, having manned a harpoon on a still-floating portion of the ship and skewering the leviathan’s eye as it rose from the depths, the beast recoiling in pain and diving beneath the waves, never to return. The shipwreck drifted to shore some hours later, the flotsam scattering the beach. For weeks she survived here, having broken her chains, surviving off what little she could scrounge from the land. But she was raised in the cloistered manor of her aristocratic father, she held no wits to start a fire, catch, skin and cook a meal, and only a faint idea of identifying poisonous berries and mushrooms from botany books she had read in her studies.

By the time rescue came, she had grown malnourished, the shackles still bound to her, but loosely rattling around her wrists. A wound she had sustained had grown infected, blinding her in one eye, and it seemed death would have claimed her had she spent even a few more days there. Though she expected a Baldurian merchant or military vessel to pluck her from the shore, she was instead met with the grinning face a Dwarven captain with a beard as dark as midnight, hailing her from the deck. He fed her a generous portion of the ship’s stores as he asked for her story. By the time she had finished both words and meal, the captain had offered her a place on his ship, the Gilded Seahorse. She would become the ship’s fisher, having formed an obsession with the harpoon guns after her encounter with the Leviathan, a fact that amused Captain Baradin to no end.

The timid and meek girl he found on the beach quickly grew into a sensation among sailors and pirates alike, openly bragging about her conquests and adventures in just about every sailor’s inn from Abunor to Greypeak. Though many might not know her name, the story of the girl who traded eyes with a Leviathan is one that any Tharadori sailor will have heard in the last five years. Now Fiona is still aboard the Gilded Seahorse years later, readying for a voyage that may be her last as they sail to uncover the bounty of the Damned Galleon.