Among the desert people, those destined to serve the will of a god are marked at a young age. Stilgar, son of Uthgar, was one such blessed, having showed the potential to become a great warrior-priest early in life.
Instilled with the ferocity of the sand-shark, trained in the use of the Goddess’ favored weapons, and taught to search within for the power to heal and smite, Stilgar quickly earned a place of pride within his tribe. Though still young, many already began to wonder if he would challenge for clan leader when he fully came of age.
With such early successes in life, it would only be natural for a young man like Stilgar to succumb to his own pride. Fortune blessed him, however, with a strict father who taught him humility and honor before all else and his human mother, Leiana, who taught him compassion and judgment to “fill in the spaces of his heart”, thus making their son a complete person.
By the time Stilgar’s fifteenth birthday was upon him, he was ready to take the test of manhood for both priest and warrior.

He would never get the chance.

Stilgar’s tribe, a small group of nomadic raiders called the Ashanti, survived by trading with and occasionally raiding the hobgoblin “hut-dwellers” of the more fertile regions that bordered the desert. Strangely enough, this sort of arrangement, violent as it was, had sort of become the standard for both raider and raided. The Ashanti had existed like this for well over three decades.
But some took exception to this cyclical violence and made it their purpose to end the raiders’ way once and for all. A deal was made with a more powerful kingdom in the interior who promised to hunt down and destroy the Ashanti if the fringe people promised to pay allegiance (and therefore taxes) to the great kingdom. The deal was signed and so too was the Ashanti people’s fate.

The day before his test, Stilgar awoke to a rain of fire.
The screams of his people, of his family, will haunt Stilgar forever. So too will the image of his mother burning at the end of half a dozen flaming arrows. The kingdom’s hunters had surrounded the Ashanti village, casting hundreds of searing missiles into it and setting alight the entire camp. When the mounted soldiers finally rode in, they crossed swords with no one.

All had perished that day … save one.

To this day, Stilgar still cannot fully account for his survival. He remembers the central pillar of the tent snapping under its own burning weight and then his entire world going black. Even if he had survived the suffocation and the fire, the soldiers gathering the dead for inventory would surely have slain him had he shown any signs of life. Soldiers are trained to put even corpses to the sword (just to be safe). They should have.
All Stilgar knows is that the Goddess protected him. She had saved him from certain demise for a purpose he could only guess at.

If any signs had been given, Stilgar was keeping them to himself …