Merchant Princess Azar Torabi
Merchant Princess. High priestess of our lady of water Azar Torabi (a.k.a. The Priestess Princess)
Mental characteristics
Personal history
The Torabi were a comfortably mediocre middle class family with few aspirations beyond maintaining the status quo. Case in point when their daughter Azar was born touched by the element of water and genie ancestry rather then play it up or try to use it to gain notoriety they instead hammered mediocrity into the young girl. She was forced to keep her blue skin covered at all times in either cloths of heavy make up and she was forbade from speaking the elemental tongue or using her latent magical powers where they could be seen. Her family had no desire to rock the boat as it was and Azar just a nail to be hammered into place.
Azar's childhood was frustrating and hard with her desire for personal freedom being torn at by her feelings of familial piety. A part of her wanted to break free but another could never hurt her father and mother and so she suffered up until one fateful night of her fourteenth year. In a moment of desire she unveiled her face one of her peers whom she thought was her friend and had strong feelings for. Her former friend rebuffed her and told Azars parents. Azar came home heartbroken to face her angery father and mother. Broken hearted and unable to endure her father and mother she finally yelled back calling her parents useless unloving wretches she tore off her heavy robes and mask and attempted to storm out of the family home. Her father and older brother tried to stop her only for Azar to knock them aside with a torrent of conjured water and run away into the night.
Distraught and deeply emotionally wounded Azar found herself alone in a temple of the Goddess Sulnira here among the peaceful fountains and reflective pools she at last was able to drop into the water and release a life time of emotions. Her crying awoke the temples clergy and when they found the water-kin girl waist deep in a reflective pool weeping they did as their goddess asked and came to her to help ease her pain.
For the first time Azar felt like someone cared about her, like someone valued her and her feelings. In her heart she felt like this was the family she wanted and Sulnira the kind goddess of rain was her spiritual mother. Azar took it upon herself to seek shelter in the temple from her blood family and dedicate herself to learning how to serve Sulnira and call upon her holy magic. While older then many aspiring clerics Azar worked hard and found inspiration in the growing romance between her and an orphan girl who was her senior by a year and a half that was an aspiring holy warrior of the faith.
At first she was scared to admit she had feelings for another woman but as she learned more of her goddess and Sulniras compassion and kindness she discovered that such things that were sometimes looked down upon by society at large were neither looked down upon nor shunned inside the walls of Sulnira's temples where all hearts and souls are treated with equal compassion and care. Spurred on by newfound freedom and a desire to repay the goddess and the clergy who she know felt were her family in her soul Azar would join Sulnira as a combat trained priestess in less then two years of intense training.
Azar and her now lover the holy warrior Atefeh would start their career when the church was tasked with aiding the nation against a massive gnoll invasion. As a military medic and battle cleric Azar witnessed firsthand the quality of healers and medics on the front line and quality of the medical attention given to the poorest soldiers. To remedy this she kept a portion of the donations given to her by the wealthy soldiers to tend to them and used it to invest in better supplies and medical training for soldiers from less affluent backgrounds or with no direct support to pay for expensive healing magic and alchemy. After the gnoll pirates were driven back to the sea Azar found that she had developed a network of contacts among healers, alchemists specializing in healing supplies, herbalists and both the common solider and the wealthy warriors she had personally tended to.
She and her lover would be wed six months after the conflict ended only to be sent on a mission from the temple to hunt down a dangerous wind mage who was holding several small towns at bay with the treat of using weather control magic to cause drought. Azar and Atefah found themselves soon embroiled in the scheme of a mad wizard drawing upon a relic that could command the weather. Azar and Atefah faced the wizard and his weather controlling relic in a terrible battle that saw Atefah cut down by a sizzling lightning bolt cast by the mage seconds before Azars conjured water elemental crushed the mad mans spine to dust. Azar rushed to her fallen wife's side and wept. In that moment Azar felt a surge of new found divine insight and power and her weeping became a steady chant of prayers until Atefah would shudder her life having been called back from the brink of the next world. This display of powerful divine magic and the defeat of the mad wizard would see Azar become the high priestess of Sulnira for the city of Al-Jarrabadh.
With her newfound rank and the contacts she had earned during her military service and adventures she and Atefah helped to form a religious network between her goddesses various shrines, temples and merchants and providers of healing teaching and tools. Her goal was not to cater to the health of the rich but to ensure that healing was equally available to the poor and every military unit would be be able to field a dedicated healer. Much to Azars surprise many charitable people came forward and offered her their aid and her goddess (who had always been popular) found coffers, donations and tithing at all time high. Supported by her beloved wife and her church Azar would be nominated to become a Merchant Princess using the cities laws that temples are businesses like any other to back her status as a Merchant prince. (In fact this was not the first time such had occurred in history but in every case until now it was temples of the merchant gods who supported their agents in such a way)
Azar now stands as one of the few women and the first priestess of Sulnira to sit on the Princes council. Many are not fond of her kind heart nor her life choices but few can doubt her wisdom nor the power of divine magic and perhaps even more dangerous to her adversaries that beyond her wealth, beyond her personal power she stands with an entire religion behind her.
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