Ishtabima Mamura (concept)
Bodyguard, Magi, partisan of the would-be Mamura Sanad, and controversial saint, Ishtabima's historical origins are somewhat murky with alternate sources claiming her to have been a bastard-born niece of the Mamura, or even just a commoner who proved herself during the tumult of the Halakdun. Regardless, she demonstrated her martial and tactical prowess on multiple occasions while serving her mistress, rising to serve both as her foremost minister, and eventually as de facto commander on her armies. Indeed, some partisans of Ishtabima have gone so far as to claim that Sanad's defeat at the Battle of Azareq was due to her forsaking her general's advice in favor of the duplicitous conspiracy which saw her exiled from Sanad's war council.
Tales of Isthabima's death and life are notoriously contradictory. Though she died at the relatively tender age of thirty-eight (or forty-five, or twenty-seven depending on whether one adheres to certain heterodox historical records) she had already built up a devoted following amongst partisans of Sanad, which has only grown since her death. Though she is renowned for a number of martial exploits (the Envelopment at the Brooks and the Two-ringed Fort by which she won the siege of Tishwarada (which dashed for good the ambitions of the Ritualist Prophet Mannahawaswa), her most famous action is known today as the Righteous Stand. There at the lone bridge crossing the rive A'Authia she is said to have slain no less than a thousand soldiers and Magi in a desperate attempt to protect Sanad's army as she retreated from the pursuing armies of the Wardenite pretender Abathis, fighting every spell and sword technique she knew. Exposure sickness accrued from the magic she wove that day, which boiled marrow and turned the very flesh of Abathis' pursuing soldiers to red ruin, is said to have contributed to her death a scant few months after. Those who hold her as a saint view this act of ultimate devotion as a kind of sacred martyrdom—not a useless or symbolic sacrifice, but a planned and strategically calculated suicide. It is said that as she was carried off that day her entire body glowed ochre with the Arcana radiation of unspeakable energies, a final and fatal proof to her devotion to her cause and to her Mamura.
To die, and to do so for devotion beyond the ability of any living mortal to name. To achieve a fate on Aeras beyond this pale and fleeting world; is that not transcendent? So say her partisans among the Beshashuriyya at least. It is an unremarkably banal tragedy that she herself left not a single word to justify her actions, and to explain the cause at whose feet she willingly spilled her lifeblood. Did Sanad herself know?