Azoxia "Seven" Ilhui (a-ZO-sha ILL-hwi)

The Xalotli knight Azoxia "Seven" Ilhui is a sacred Thunderbird warrior who awakened in late 713 after spending four centuries in a near-death state and who, as part of the Consequences, led the Tolucan army to victory against the First Caelan Legion of the Federal Military. As of 718, Seven has returned to Toluca, where she serves as a guardian and close companion of Empress Valissia ce'Xalotl.

Biography

Azoxia Ilhui was born in Toluca (in its first location, near Cethandir) on the 20th of Dawning, 296, the second of three children born to Inxa Alitli and Ohtlicoy Ilhui, a baker and a brewer respectively. Azoxia was born during a period of Tolucan self-isolation; as such, she was raised in a deeply neo-Tseketon culture, with Eldercommon as her mother tongue.   In mid-304 YC, a wild-magic-induced crop blight struck Toluca, resulting in a year of famine and disease that killed around 5% of the city's population. Azoxia was particularly unlucky; several of her relatives died of illness magnified by hunger, and by the time she was 7 years old, she was an orphan, the sole remaining member of her family. A cousin who lived as a monk at the Grey Priory, a cloister of warrior-clergy of the Mother of Storms, paved the way for her to be taken in there; she spent the rest of her youth in the Priory, where she became a page to one of the warriors living in the temple garrison. In her teens, when her training in martial combat began in earnest, she showed significant promise, and she was initiated as a knight in 315, when she was 19 years old.   In 318, the newly-crowned monarch, Valissia, the Witch-Queen of Toluca, asked the Prioress to enact an ancient ceremony to select and consecrate a number of Thunderbirds, elite holy warriors of great spiritual significance in Tseketon tradition. Azoxia was among the nine knights selected to become a Thunderbird. After a year of specialized training and rigorous spiritual contemplation, Azoxia was consecrated as a Thunderbird. Much of that year of training was spent among the Queen's Blades, the city-state's most elite secular division of warriors who served as personal guards to the monarch. During this time, Azoxia became a well-known favorite of the Witch-Queen, who sought and received the Prioress' approval for Azoxia to remain in service among the Blades following her initiation as a Thunderbird. In reference to her status as both a Thunderbird and a Blade of the Witch-Queen, Azoxia was hailed with the epithet Twice-Sacred. Azoxia remained in service as a Blade until Nightwinter of 322, when the Federal Military descended upon Toluca following an attempt by the queen to open peaceable diplomatic channels between Toluca and the Federation, and the Thunderbirds were called to war.   Though the Tolucan army ultimately managed to repel the assault by the Federal Army, their victory came at a massive cost. Much of Toluca was destroyed by the conflict, ultimately leading its surviving citizens to relocate to the present-day location of Toluca, near Caelus, and the number of survivors was not much larger than the number of casualties. Azoxia was one of those casualties. Reports from a surviving Thunderbird indicate that she was lethally wounded by one of the Federal Army's cavalry mages and subsequently trampled into the desert sand; though extensively-documented searches for her body (and the bodies of other Tolucans slain in the conflict) were carried out, none of her remains were found.   It is attested that the loss of Azoxia—and the grief-maddened hope that Azoxia's body would one day be found, enabling her resurrection—led the Witch-Queen to pursue the druidic undeath that has enabled her to live hundreds of years beyond her natural lifespan.   Nearly four hundred years later, a scale-studded woman in her mid-twenties was found unconscious and all but dead in the barren desert surrounding the Direhelm Federal Laboratory in rural Cethandir. A guard, performing a routine patrol of the premises, discovered her body late at night on the 48th of Dawning, 713—mere days prior to the Severing—and brought her into the laboratory, where a few physicians and scientists working the night shift managed to stabilize her. At first, she was uncommunicative; soon it became clear that she did not remember who she was. Azoxia had indeed survived, awoken perhaps by wild magic after four hundred years of being dead in the sand. Though the sacred magic that inured all Thunderbirds to death doubtlessly helped keep her from rotting away, her centuries-long preservation far exceeds what could be expected of any Thunderbird. In the absence of any better explanation, some Tolucans attribute her immaculate survival to the sheer deluded hope of one particularly powerful witch.   Without any memories of her life before her awakening, the woman picked up the nickname Seven, after the final digit in the temporary ID number she was assigned during her initial intake at the facility, a nickname that would become her sole identity in the years to come. When the Severing destroyed much of the facility days after her arrival, on the day it was planned for Seven to be transferred to a hospital in Cethandir, she was one of two survivors; the other, Daigonis "Dai" Ūdris, a survivor of years of solitary confinement and starvation as part of a program of human experimentation, left the facility with Seven in the aftermath of its destruction. In the years that followed, as they traveled and accumulated fellow travelers along the way, they became the first two members of the revolutionary group that would be known as the Consequences.   During her time in the Consequences, Seven began to recall her training as a warrior, skills that she honed as the group pursued its goals of revealing the Federation's history of grievous human rights abuses and liberating survivors of its programs of human experimentation. In 717, the Consequences reached Toluca, and Seven was reunited with the Witch-Queen for the first time since she fell in battle four hundred years previously; she was hailed as a champion upon her return. Soon after her return to Toluca, Seven was entrusted with leadership of the Tolucan army in a conflict with the First Caelan Legion of the Federal Military over the Wildwood Site, which had become a base for revolutionary activities after the Severing. The battle was decisively in favor of the Tolucans; Seven slew the opposing army's legate in close combat, after which the First Caelan Legion surrendered. A majority of its legionnaires ultimately defected to Toluca as an act of protest against the disorganization that had plagued the Federal Military in the aftermath of the Severing.   As the Consequences' efforts expanded into the ongoing restructuring and reform of the Federal government in 718, Seven returned to Toluca to resume her role as a guardian and close companion to Valissia ce'Xalotl.

Personal Life

As of 718, Seven lives and works in Toluca, where she was reconsecrated as a Thunderbird and retitled a Blade of the Empress following the Witch-Queen's ascendence to the role of empress of the newly-founded state of New Xalotl. The extent of her involvement in Xalotli politics is unknown, though she is observed to be a close companion of Valissia, suggesting that Seven is at least indirectly influential in Toluca and New Xalotl.