Dihya

BIOGRAPHY

Dihya Priscus was born on January 7th, 25 BR in the fortified town of Castra Kasserina, on the Aurean side of the border between the Aurean Dominate and the Haxamanian Empire. Her father was an Aurean soldier in the local Limitanei garrison, while her mother was an indigenous Imazi woman he met, fell in love with, and married while stationed there. While she learned to speak both Imazi and Aurean, Dihya grew up immersed far more in Imazi culture than Aurean, as her father was hardly around and her mother did essentially all the parenting. When Dihya was only two years old, the Haxamanian Empire invaded and seized the Aurean Exarchate of Tifinagh, part of the Aurean Dominate where Dihya's family lived, and Dihya's father was called up for war. She would never see him again, as he would soon die in battle. Castra Kasserina was one of the first cities to fall to Haxamanian occupation, and essentially all of Dihya's childhood was spent under Haxamanian rule.

The Haxamanian occupation was fairly hands-off and they did little but keep troops on street corners and collect taxes. However, Dihya's family ran a farm that sold grain and olive oil to the Aurean Government for the food dole, and with the Aurean Government no longer able to buy from them and the father dead, Dihya and her mother fell on hard times. Dihya's mother started raising pigs to sell the pork, and while this helped, Dihya and her mother still found themselves impoverished.

Dihya had to grow up fast, helping care for the pigs at a very early age. Additionally, she helped feed herself and her mother by becoming a street urchin and taking to banditry, using a discarded knife she found to rob passersby on the street and sell any valuables she found. This led to quite a few run-ins with the Haxamanian garrison, who tried numerous times to deal with her but couldn't really punish her because she was too young. It was likely during these run-ins that Dihya picked up the Haxamanian Language. During the course of her banditry, she found an orphaned hyena cub in the woods near Castra Kasserina, taking him in despite her mother's complaints and naming him Jugurtha. Despite being only a cub, Jugurtha proved to be both very messy and difficult to feed, resulting in Dihya having to go on even more excursions to rob the wealthy of the area. 

When Dihya was thirteen, the Aurean Dominate had recaptured Tifinagh and Aurean rule returned. However, Dihya and her mother's family farm was destroyed by the retreating Haxamanians as part of a scorched-earth tactic to weaken the approaching Aureans, meaning that even once the Aureans were back, they couldn't sell crops to the Aurean Government because they had none to sell. As a result, Dihya, her mother, and Jugurtha became homeless, and were reduced to traveling beggars.

After around a year, Dihya, her mother, and Jugurtha found themselves performing in a circus in the town of Theveste, but the conditions were so terrible that Dihya's mother was worked to death by the time Dihya was fourteen, leaving her an orphan. As soon as her mother was no longer in the picture, the circus trainers started having her perform more and more sexualized dancing for higher and higher pay, and she actually ended up…not hating it, because she liked the attention, it was a distraction from the grief of her mother's death, and because she’d been poor basically all her life and was glad to be able to feed herself and Jugurtha (the hyena) for once.  Eventually, this escalated to the point where the circus trainers started pimping her out to random people but both because of the pay and because she ended up happening to be one of those ppl who just…really likes sex, she didn’t really mind it all that much, at least at the time, unless the person she ended up with was really gross looking or mean. Also during her time in the circus, the trainers forced Dihya to perform all sorts of stunts on horseback, and because of this, Dihya would become a very skilled horsewoman. Eventually, however, she grew tired of the way the circus trainers would treat her and left on a horse she stole and would name Masinissa after her late father.

She eventually went into acting (keep in mind this is Aurea where acting and prostitution kind of go hand in hand) and ended up doing that until around the the time she was nineteen, by which time she’d managed to become fairly well off and make enough money to buy her own place in the provincial capital of Carthadasta. After a performance of a play there, she met an up-and-coming military commander/politician named Taftus she fell in love with. While she and Taftus were in their secret relationship, she met many of his well-connected friends in politics, including Gorgo Gualtera, the Magister Equitum (head commander of all cavalry in the Aurean Dominate), Lucius Gallus Pastor (the Governor of Zebusylvania Province), and most important of all, the Dominus (head of state) himself, Gavicus XXIX. One day, Dihya so impressed Taftus with her horseback riding skills that he offered her a cavalry command under him should she leave her acting job and join the Aurean military, and she accepted.

Dihya did a very good job training the cavalry under her command, and after helping Taftus win a crushing victory against the Haxamanians at the Battle of Adua, found herself building a military and political career she never thought possible. She soon found herself promoted to Dux Equitum of the Awal Isles, meaning she was the supreme cavalry commander for all of Tifinagh's islands. During this time, she would meet Pompeia Khan, a half-Tangolian gladiatrix who had managed to become friends with Gavicus and would even get made his Consigliere (2nd in command and heir should he die in office) after his old one was impeached on corruption charges. Gavicus was assassinated soon after by an unknown assailant, and when Dihya was 25, Pompeia would make her the Exarch (military governor) of Tifinagh upon taking office.