The Exiled Blades of the Cinder Chain
Warband Leader:
Heroic Trait: Ferocious Combatant
Artefact of Power: The enchanted polearm Last Light
Takara is a young human woman, 24 summers old at most, with light-tanned skin and piercingly dark eyes. Her jet-black hair is long but often tied back. She wears maroon and dark gray armor over a crimson and black tunic and pants, with a bright red sash tied around her waist. In terms of weaponry, she deftly wields a lightly enchanted polearm as if it were a much more compact weapon.
Kido Takara is the daughter of the deposed and missing warlord Kido Takeo of Aqhsy, who once forged his village into a formidable fighting force to stem a tide of Nighthaunt that threatened to overwhelm her home island in the Cinder Chain of Aqshy’s Dawnsgift Isles. After consolidating the disparate villages of the island into a prosperous city-fortress known as the Furnace, peace reigned for nearly two decades.
Eventually,jealousy consumed one of Takeo’s viziers, who, in desperation, overthrew the warlord by releasing a renewed procession of Undead spirits via sabotaging the sanctified and thrice-blessed wards within the fortress walls. Though Takeo slew the vizier in the desperate fighting that ensued, he was gravely wounded and forced to withdraw to save his family, who departed the Cinder Chain on the last vessel that could carry them, while the vizier, in return for his service to the Undead, was resurrected as a Knight of Shrouds and took control of the Furnace in his place.
It is to the nightmarish mockery of a kingdom her father fled so many years ago that Takara wishes to return when she becomes strong enough, hoping to free her people from the clutches of the Undead.
Achievements
Outskirts of the Gnarlwood.
Quests
Sevirin "Sev" Fireheart
Sevirin is something of an oddity among the warriors of the Exiled Blades, being both foreign to the Dawnsgift Isles and their one magic use, aligned to the Bright Wind of her native realm, Aqshy, her entire life. However, she only grew to understood her abilities years later, and still struggles to master them under the occasional tutelage of several contacts within Azyr's Collegiate Arcane. Thus, she still favors the use of comparatively mundane weaponry and assorted pieces of armor in conjunction with various temporary enchantments cast upon her wargear during combat, rather than relying exclusively on the Wind of Fire as her primary weapon.
Though once a soldier of the Freeguild regiments of Brightspear, Fireheart served as a mercenary for much of her youth after going missing in battle when separated from her comrades in enemy territory. She likely would've perished in the wastelands if not for the arrival of a scavenger warband of Ogor and human mercenaries, the leader of which (one Thunderfist named Bragh Titanroar) decided to spare her from death because, as he put it, "wouldn't make much of a meal on her own." Instead, impressed by her stubbornness and keen eye, he decided to teach her how to shoot "properly" with one of his dead comrades' crossbows, and soon took her on as a "temp'ry" member of the warband.
Months of travel and combat rolled into years of the same; by the end of it, Sevrin and Bragh were the only mercenaries left in the warband. They decided to part ways amicably, Bragh going to Azyrheim to seek out further work (eventually finding gainful employment as a bodyguard for the Collegiate Arcane's battlemages), while Sevrin was left to find a patron of her own. After several unsuccessful searches, she found one in Takara of the Exiled Blades, who needed both an experienced warrior to mentor her newer recruits, as well as a less obtrusive "left hand" who could be relied upon for more subtle endeavors.
Eventually, she and Takara began to fall in love.