Description and Background
Description:
Zahra is tall enough to look most men in the eyes, her body all sleek muscle like the lioness she prays to. Her face--oft hidden by the gilt lion-head helm of her warrior sisterhood--is not pretty, but is striking, with high cheekbones and narrow lips. Her skin is ivory pale, as is her hair (typically bound in a tight braid, coiled beneath her helm). Her eyes are the color of amber. She usually wears a cuirass of metal bands, with a studded leather skirt about her hips and thighs. Her limbs are bare except for laced sandals and a bronze armlet. Weapons--a studded mace and a long bronze dagger--hang at her belt, a long slim sword slants across her back, and she usually carries a sheaf of javelins and her prized brazen shield, bearing the lion-on-sunburst design, polished to dazzling brightness.
Zahra is skilled at arms, yet inexperienced; in all ways except when it comes to blows, she can be hesitant and uncertain. Almost naive about many things, but too suspicious for that word to fully fit. No scholar, she prefers action to words, and favors Alexander's approach to twisty problems.
She has a mild fear of the outdoors, having grown up inside the Pyramid.
Background:
As a child, Zahra was shy and quiet, staying to the background; this became only more pronounced as she began to get her growth, becoming tall and gangly and awkward. Once she grew used to her body, she began to exercise it constantly, and achieve the potential for grace and power that lay within it. She reveled in this, and the newfound confidence that came when she began to be trained with spear and sword and mace. Among her sisters, she felt in place at long last. She was close with Tumika, the woman who trained her, and it is Tumika's shield she now bears, inherited when her spear-sister fell to the beast-men.
It is her hatred for the monsters that surround her home--and, she has heard it rumored, the god-thing that commands them--that have led her to leave the enclave of the warrior-women of Sekhmet. Though she has never seen a living lion, Zahra knows from tales and writings that they were not meant to be pent up...she must roam and hunt, and strike down her enemies, and those of her people. |
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