[22/08/2026] Daily Art Drop

Riyana is a 34-year-old Phazani freelance warrior and former Sister of Endurance. She grew up in Noxmire, a grim foundry town in the Phazani heartland, the middle child of a working-class family. At sixteen, she saw a recruiting march of the Sisters pass through her street and walked out of her mother's laundry to enlist on the spot.

She served nearly a decade as a Sister, rising close to the rank of Battle-Abbess. High Prioress Chalissa herself took note of her during a garrison review. Riyana fought in three campaigns, earned her Shield Company's respect, and committed fully to Za̅hrani's three virtues: victory, duty, and honour.

Her break came during her eighth year, when her Shield Company was deployed to crush a miners' uprising near the Elarindorian border. The miners were desperate workers, not soldiers, and the order to clear their barricades came because the mine's owner had ties to the Ironclad court. Riyana refused. She was not formally punished, but the silence afterward told her everything: the order remembered, even if Za̅hrani forgave. She left at twenty-seven. She kept her iron sunburst pin, and took her first contract as a caravan guard.

Seven years later, she works across the Phazani kingdom and beyond as an expensive, principled sellsword. She is warm, generous, and quick to laugh, but carries a controlled ferocity beneath the warmth that surfaces fast when innocents are threatened. She still prays at dawn, fasts during the Season of Burdens, and touches her sunburst pin before every fight. Her faith in Za̅hrani never wavered. What changed was her conviction that the goddess's virtues belong to her conscience, not to an institution's chain of command.