Jalani of Spit

Jalani of Spit

Jalani comes from a small dairy farm outside Spit.  As a girl, she was sent to Spit to sell the cheese and butter from her farm. While in town, she met the local priestess of Amun-Tor, a friendly scholar and teacher. The priestess gave Jalani private lessons, tutoring her in basic literacy, history, and geography. When her family discovered that she had been receiving an education, they immediately forbade her from returning to the village and put her to work in the dairy.  

 

When Jalani was a young teenager, she learned that she was betrothed to the son of the owner of the neighboring hay farm. Their union would create one of the largest and most profitable dairies in the valley. Unfortunately, the son was an insufferable lout and more than a bit mentally unstable. Jalani knew that if she married him, she would be stuck raising loutish children and she would probably never see the inside of a book again.

 

Poor as she was, she didn't have a lot of options for escape.  Eventually, Jalani was once more allowed to take the dairy products to market in Spit, so long as she was accompanied by a chaperone. Planning for weeks, Jalani had been able to set aside enough coins to buy a set of men's clothes and some basic traveling gear.  Strong and tough from a childhood shoving cattle around, she chopped her hair, bought passage upstream to Wince and hired herself out as Jack, a stout man-at-arms.  

 

She was hired by Valerius, then an unknown warrior from a back-water village of Duirndown, and joined his band on an adventure to explore the haunted house of Saltmarsh Manor.

 

After she had gotten a little experience of the world under her belt, she once again felt the pull of books and mysteries. A chance encounter with the temple of Amon-Tor in Thither revealed to her a new calling. She knew she had been chosen by the god of mysteries and riddles to seek out truth and knowledge and understanding. She had been consumed with a divine passion. Afterwards, she took the vows of a peregrine priestess of Amon-Tor and shed her guise as Jack, revealing to her comrades that she was, in fact, a woman named Jalani.

 

The new Jalani is an independent, confident woman, as unlike the shy girl she once was as her alter ego: Jack. Given her childhood isolation and complete change of garb and attitude, it's unlikely that anyone in the valley will ever recognize her as the young girl from Spit.

 

She will still eat cheese, but she will never make one again.