Meredith

One of the early heroes of Stormhaven history, Meredith did not begin her adult life as a warrior; she spent her teenage years and early twenties as a humble village blacksmith in her northern homeland of the Sea Loch Country, until she was captured when the Kiraani Empire conquered the Sea Lochs in her mid-twenties and she was loaded in chains onto a ship bound for the bustling slave port of Stonemouth. She escaped with the rest of the captives when the ship ran aground in a violent storm, and showed both her captors and her fellow ex-slaves, including the future Queen Eleri the First, founding monarch of Stormhaven, what she was capable of when her battle-madness - the unstoppable fighting rage of the berserker - broke free in the fight against the ship's guards and she utterly demolished twenty of them single-handed wielding only a loose chain. She later adopted a much more practical axe.

She quickly realised her new home needed her more as a berserker than a blacksmith, and devoted the rest of her life to keeping Stormhaven free and safe from both the Empire's military and any slavers who landed on the shores. She's also one of the only heroes of Stormhaven who isn't buried in the city itself: she died in battle thirty years after the country's founding, fighting a slave-taking gang who sought to prey on the new town in the north of the country, and in accordance with Sea Loch tradition for berserkers, a barrow was raised where she fell. Her burial mound is still there today, though its surroundings are now a park in the middle of the prosperous city of Northold rather than a lonely northern battlefield.

Meredith forcibly took her bearskin from the standard-bearer of the first Kiraani cohort to march into Stormhaven. The bear is generally recognised as the symbol of Kiraan; Meredith co-opted it as a 'fuck you' to future would-be conquerers.