Ronan Letifer was born to a husband and wife who abandoned her in their shack of a home in Ebou Dar, and from there, she learned that to survive was to be hard, even at the age of six.  Left alone with no one to care for her, the orphaned child was eventually picked up by a baker who first took pity on her and then took advantage of her and put her to work for the next ten years of her life.  Turak was never kind to her again, always using her for the hard labor he was too lazy to do, and for a time, she allowed it because she knew no better.  But as Ronan grew from being a child into a young woman, she began to realize that things weren’t as they should.  She knew that she wasn’t meant to go to sleep exhausted every night, only to wake in the dawn and repeat this labor. 

For ten years, she allowed this abuse of her body and soul to continue until one day her temper flared to life as a flame fanned by a sharp breeze and the path she would take into womanhood was set.  With her fists, she beat her benefactor and warden until his last breath had been expelled.  Yet unnoticed, she channeled for the first time, just the smallest lick of flame that set the bakery ablaze, leaving nothing back ashes in her wake, another turn in the pattern that would set her path.  It was set with the miller who denied her the right to grain and his silo exploded with her wrath, the tanner who refused to trade her shoes in exchange for labor, the horse handler who would not provide her the comfort of a hay bed and a solid roof on a rainy night.

For Ronan, she provided retribution for those who were too selfish to look to the needs of others, to the needs of herself, who deserved something more than the abject poverty she had been thrust into by the ignorance of others.  The world owed her, she had thought at such a young, naïve age of seventeen, and by her twenty-second name-day, the world decided to pay her back in the form of a woman Asha’man who happened to be near as Ronan left her latest destruction behind in the wake of her anger.  Curious and wanting to know more about “how to make fire”, she followed the woman, unknowing of what she had gotten herself into through a simple lustful choice. 

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The next eighteen months of her life were a true wake up call into what she had stepped into in ignorance and had to live through with new knowledge.  As a Soldier, she found out, she could certainly learn to channel and “make fire”, but as she learned more, Ronan found that she was a prisoner, unable to leave even if she had learned enough and didn’t want to remain.  Her stubbornness to cooperate with the Black Tower and her unwillingness to do more than what was asked of her nearly had her head on the Traitor’s Tree for her trouble.  Yet through the help of her friends Angeus and Dealeah, Ronan first changed her habits, and as time progressed, her way of thinking.  Raised after nearly a full year as a Soldier, she earned her sword pin, but not with pride.  Still, her mind turned to escaping the Black Tower and earning her freedom to do as she wished, without anyone telling her where to go and what to do.

As a Soldier, an Asha’man by the name of Faust approached her and said that if she were willing, he could place her on a path in the Black Tower that few chose for reasons that ranged from being unsuitable to simply unwilling.  Although he never came out and said the words, Ronan began to get a clear idea of what the Asha’man was telling her and by the time she was raised to Dedicated, Ronan found herself apprenticed to Master Assasin Asha’man Girvan.  For eight months she learned not only how to increase her abilities as a channeler, but her entire person underwent changes as well.  She learned to speak properly and intelligently, she was shown how to dress and act in noble company, she was taught how to seduce a man and how to get what she wanted through sexual wiles.

More importantly, Ronan was taught to kill.  Various teachers showed her how to kill with a knife, with poison, by strangulation, even the ways to take a person’s life with the One Power in a way that would leave little evidence of a channeler’s hand. During the time she learned the more subtle arts of killing, Angeus deserted, distraught by the apparent death of Dealeah.  After turning to drinking heavily and being demoted back to Soldier months after the report of her death, he slipped from the Black Tower and ran, but rather than have an Asha’man go after Angeus, Ronan offered to go after him, outraged by his actions.  It is a testament to the changes that she underwent that Ronan not only brought Angeus back to the Black Tower, but dead, killed by a crossbow bolt she placed in his back when he attempted to escape.

Ronan was fascinated by what she learned and as time progressed, she found something she was truly good at.  She excelled with what they taught and learned quickly, but it also changed her considerably.  She no longer began to think of the Black Tower as her prison because it was showing her how she could become better.  She stopped thinking of it as a place that restricted her and started thinking it provided her with goals to meet and things to be good at.  Slowly and surely, as she learned to train to be an assassin, her loyalties began to grow until she was truly Dedicated to the Black Tower.

On her return, Ronan was given her first mark and succeeded in doing what many could not.  Killing an unarmed man in cold blood.  On successful completion, she was brought before the M’Hael and awarded her second pin, the dragon pin that marked her as not on an Asha’man, but an Assassin as well.

Ronan will become an excellent assassin not because she has confidence in her skills to get close to her mark and kill them without remorse, but because she wants to be the best in the Black Tower.  For a woman who wanted nothing more than to be free of the Tower and be her own person, she has changed and strives to become an Expert Assassin, a goal she’ll no doubt reach.