Lanithro has some magical skills inherent to his Asandus blood: that is, the forming of spells from magical energy that he himself generates. For a lack of training, however, the only thing he is capable of is summoning small orbs of magical light.

Lanithro might have grown to be a handsome young man if life had only been kinder to him. His mixed blood gives him skin of a very pale peach color, though not so pale that he looks sickly, and his white hair shimmers with a rainbow's worth of iridescence. His eyes, like an Asandus's, have no visible sclera, so his pupils are set on an unbroken backdrop of yellow-gold. He is of average height for an Avengaean male human, and has a decent build due to a life of constant labor and skirmish-exercise. He is also not starved, since the Caetrae had to keep him decently fed if they wanted him to be able to put up a good fight. Aside from his eyes and hair, his gold claws and pointed teeth are his only other signs of his Asandus blood.

Lanithro's skin, however, is little more than a latticework of scars across nearly every inch of his body. His right hand has only three fingers: the thumb, ring finger, and pinky. The other two are entirely gone. His hair is a carelessly cut, shoulder-length mess, and his eyes are wide and anxious. His posture is bowed with timidity, and his movements are generally skittish.

When still enslaved by the Caetrae, Lanithro was never allowed to wear anything but black. Now he only wears white in styles that are still loose and simple as his slave-clothes were, but of far more comfortable fabric. He even still wears a scarf, no matter the weather, in habit established by the scarf the Caetrae would make him wear to hide his face when they didn't want to see it.

He favors loose clothing because it allows him to wear his knives more comfortably: under the fabric. On each forearm, under his sleeves, he wears wrist sheaths that hold two knives each (one against the underside of the forearm, and one against the top). The knives have four-inch hilts with thin, five-inch blades. Small, but easily wielded, and efficient.

Raised in the shadows of Zenitan Caetrae (also called Dark Demons), never knowing when his next beating would come but always knowing that one was inevitable, the key word for Lanithro is "paranoid." He is restless and seems constantly on edge, incapable of relaxing -- frequently he'll collapse from the exhaustion of spending his waking hours in a near-constant fight-or-flee mode that has persisted into his new freedom.

His paranoia extends only towards Caetrae, however. He lived and worked alongside human and daemon slaves, and while some were utterly loyal to their masters, others were almost as abused as Lanithro himself, and with these other slaves he had kinship that was a loose mimicry of friendship. He does not remember his father, of course, but his mother raised him on whispered stories of the many virtues and kindnesses of Asandae, so he adores the creatures despite never having met one.

Lanithro is both nyctophobic (fearing darkness and the night) and sciophobic (fearing shadows). The dark is the element of his once-captors, as well as the point from which many a Caetran would leap at him, simply for the fun of terrorizing him. He hallucinates voices and flashing eyes in darkness, and is stricken with the delusions that his old captors are pursuing him and that he will never be truly safe from them. Conversely, light brings him comfort, and he will eagerly draw near to sources of bright illumination.

Lanithro was born after a bold Askan Asandus priest of the goddess Asuka ventured to the southern Avengaean continent of Oppiuk in search of the unenlightened souls he believed he'd find there. He was not disappointed when he found a small community of humans etching out a timid life in the shadow of the nearby Caetran territories. The Asandus, Elucid Baiulo, settled in with the determination to teach the poor humans all about his goddess and give them hope in their dreary life. While he was there, Elucid fell in love with one of the locals, a woman named Lera Denvril -- not a surprising thing, given the ease with which Avengaean Asandae fall in love. The two bore a child together, but before Elucid could relocate his new family to the safety of the Asandus territories, a band of Zenitan Caetrae discovered the tiny settlement.

Elucid was slain in the attack, as were several humans that tried to help fight back the invasion. The rest were captured, including Lera and her infant halfbreed son. The Caetrae took the humans with them back to the Caetran city of Speros, and the survivors were divided up as property. The lucky souls were the ones who were immediately eaten; the rest were made into slaves, serving Caetrae eager to have the luxury of being waited on hand and foot.

Lera was one of these survivors, and when the half-Asandus nature of her son was finally noticed, the Caetran family argued long and violently over what was to be done with him. Some of the Caetrae wanted to kill him, since the Caetran and Asandus races were magical opposites and mortal enemies. Others wanted to keep him enslaved, since the chance to own a half-Asandus would likely never come again. Two Caetran deaths later, the pack matriarch, Faqua, claimed Lera and the infant as her own. Lera was allowed to keep and raise the boy, but only so that he could become a plaything to the Caetran pack when he grew older.

The victorious side of the argument reveled in having a slave that was not just half-Asandus, but half Askan Asandus (the Light-aligned counter to their own Darkness). Lanithro was loaned from hand to hand as Faqua's generosity shifted, and made to do all kinds of menial tasks as the Caetrae gloated in their power over him. The kinder Caetrae were the ones who ignored him, for the rest took just as much pleasure in beating him within an inch of death as they did bossing him around. Not a week could ever go by without the half-Asandus being beaten at least once, though it would frequently be much more often than that. Lanithro lost the two fingers from his right hand when a Caetran, wanting to taste half-Asandus flesh for itself, bit them off. (Said Caetran also received the thrashing of his life when Faqua found out that her prized slave nearly bled to death from the wound, which no Caetran had initially cared enough to tend to.)

The pack's cubs were just as cruel as the adults. They too enjoyed harassing the half-Asandus at every turn, leaping out at him from shadows as he staggered from task to task. In some ways, Lanithro feared the pups more than he did the adults, for the Caetran children had far more free time with which to torment him.

As the boy grew into an adolescent, the Caetrae turned him into a different kind of sport. Beating a body that never attempted to defend itself lost some of its entertainment value, so the Caetrae taught Lanithro how to fight back. They forced him to learn how to wield thin knives, goading him into frantic battles like a cockerel with metal spurs. The Caetrae would spar with him in their human shapes, wielding knives of their own, making a game out of it all.

They made up the rule that if Lanithro could win, he could not be beaten that day, and actually stuck to it -- it meant that the half-Asandus fought with greater enthusiasm and desperation, knowing he was guaranteed a day free of the pain of claws and teeth if he could just win. A participant was considered to have lost when either pinned by his opponent, or driven to his knees by blood-loss from blade wounds.

By the time he was a young man, Lanithro was quite skilled with his knives, and won more often than he lost. Eventually Lanithro was allowed to wear his knives all the time so that he would always be ready to fight, no matter when he was challenged.

This was their mistake.