[piosenniel]

Character Description Form:

Have you ever played in an RPG at the Barrow Downs? – YES - Which one? The Lonely Star, Shadow of a Star, The Gathering In, The Long Winter, Wolf Run, A Ride to the Darkside, On Patrol, Castle Maladil, Picnic at the Bonfire Glade, An Audience with the King

Have you posted in The Green Dragon Inn or in The White Horse in Rohan? – YES – Both

For your character please include:

NAME: Jamílah Fajr – Resister

AGE: 37

RACE: Man

GENDER: Female

WEAPONS: Ironwood mace with small obsidian blades along both edges; obsidian tipped wooden spear; small hunting bow for very small game and birds; obsidian knife with mumak tusk handle; her herbs and concoctions.

APPEARANCE: 5’ 7” (1.7 meters); 125 lbs (57 kg); dark black skin; dark brown eyes; black hair, short, tightly curled against her head; small framed; lithe; well muscled. Wears the traditional brightly colored long skirt of her mother’s family tribe with a sleeveless loose white shirt, embroidered with symbols of the rising sun. On the back of her right hand, between her thumb and first finger, is the raised scar tattoo of the sun, and on her left, in a like manner, is the new quarter moon, a single small star lying in the shadowed area.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: A deeply intuitive woman; intelligent; open minded; considers problems thoroughly before making decisions; quiet; calm; her presence is very reassuring – she is the sort of person that others seek out when troubled; well versed in native herbal and natural lore – she can deal out remedies for both healing and for death. When her family is threatened, she is completely ruthless – a hunter and avenger without remorse.

Weaknesses: She is very tradition bound with respect to her spiritual and social beliefs. She is a follower of the Old Way. Her family, especially her children and their children, come first, then her mother’s tribal ways, then her husband’s. Pulls by these traditional values can often make her choices less informed by intellect and reason and more informed by her heart.

HISTORY: She was born into a prosperous trading tribe of the Hither Lands, far east of Umbar, near one of the large bays along the Inner Seas. Her Mother was a medicine woman of her tribe and she passed her knowledge to her daughters – divination with the small bones of various animals and birds, rituals for healings and other needs, the making of medicines and poisons.

Jamíla, as most women in her tribe, was married at the age of sixteen. She has two daughters, in their early twenties with babies of their own. Her Husband was a trader in metals and precious gems from the plains farther west of her lands, near the Sundering Seas. Desiring to see what the world beyond her own lands held, it was her choice to follow him to his birth place. He died soon after the birth of their second child, a wasting sickness caught in the teeming city of Umbar while on a trading trip.

First Post:

It was early evening. Families were gathered in front of their tents, eating the day’s end meal. Children laughed and ran among the groups, stealing a bit of flat bread here, a slice of fruit there. The elders clucked at them in mock remonstrance, their wide bright smiles belying any real anger.

‘Little birds,’ they called out to them, ‘why do you steal a poor man’s last crumbs!’

The children shrieked with laughter at the question, their voices trailing off as they ran wildly into the tall grass toward the last rays of the setting sun.

Jamíla picked at her food as she watched the children. Though the approaching night was warm, she felt a chill creep across her shoulders. ‘Some unlucky breeze from the north,’ she thought to herself, though glancing up, the tall grass of the plains stood deathly still against the last inches of light, the tip of each stalk seeming to burn with a reddish glow. She shook her shoulders trying to shake off the cold feeling, and placed her right palm against her heart to ward off evil.

Until a very few years ago, life for her had gone smoothly. There were birthings to be seen to, and dying to be eased. Women seeking husbands, wanting babies. Men seeking wives, better fortunes, greater luck in the hunt. Rites of passage to be seen to. The ordinary things that made a full, good life for her.

But then came the first hints of shadow and despair. First on the ashy wind that blew sometimes from the north, bringing a faint sharp, bitter smell, then in the darkness that grew in her readings as she cast the bones to augur at the new moon’s rising. And now, among many of the young, a festering shadow had crept in to devour their spirits.

Jamílah stood and beckoned for her daughters to stand also. ‘Call your children in,’ she told them in a low, urgent voice. ‘Call them quickly. Keep them close. Some shadow comes for us, and soon . . . with bloodied hands . . .’