Jiala Holloway
Jiala Holloway is Váthi’s mother and one of the Feldwynnen, the female elven rangers of the north who could adapt to the land so well that they could shape-change in it. Some believe they have seen them in feral form, but never confirmed, as they are typically impossible to track.
Jiala was known to Cathartic by name of Sítha. Jiala/Sítha offered her ship to give Cathartic and her future handmaidens passage to Sarapadia. She showed Masako how to pilot the craft and helped them acquire the goods they needed for their journey, paying for their food and clothing with the gold she got for the ship. The elven ship was small but seaworthy, and very easy to pilot, and its appearance being low and dark made it difficult to spot. Sítha also showed Masako how to navigate in day and night, and gave them a small crystal she called a sun-stone to use for navigation as their polar trip would render a compass useless. When Masako asked why Sítha was helping them leave the archipelago, Sítha replied that it was foretold by Nissa and that they were to sail to Kyrfor in the [Middle Kingdom], and Sítha was to carry on and look for a route from the archipelago to the mainlaind in a hunt for a safe route to contact the Elves of Tarisir.
Little was know about her whereabouts in the years following her encounter with Cathartic until she met the party. She relayed the following information: “I have spent the last three decades using the island archipelago called Wakoku, Cathartic’s island of origin, as a base of operations since it seemed spared from the ravages of war. All of Apadia is changed from what Kyðeon described, with Tarisir being a fragment of its former glory. Where once was a lush forest covering much of Thalássia, there is now desert, a wasteland of death as far as the eye can see. Only in the southern portion of the land mass is any of the forest remaining, and only perhaps a quarter of its size. Palám is both better and worse: there are more settlements of good folk, but the southern tip and the mountains there are are teeming with evil and fell creatures: hobgoblins, drow, spiders, duergar, and a number of dragons and wyverns. They number in the tens of thousands, and the entire southern sea coast is one giant shipyard and dockyard as they construct massive warships to bring their invasion forces to Sarapadia. I may have encountered other feldwynnen there, but we tend to not socialize as we have our own missions to accomplish. I did find the remains of a number of my clan, who were enslaved magically and forced to stay in their feral form, then hunted for sport. I found some of their heads mounted as trophies in the halls of Dukhâl, the Giant Lord of their shipyards. I stole their maps and their missives to troops for movements and brought them with me for analysis by the Loremasters of the Western Kingdom to compute the actual troop numbers and locations, launch dates, and landing dates for the Enemy’s forces. We have to notify King Kyðeon and Lord General Maecas of the incoming forces. Why they would choose to invade Sarapadia seems a folly to me; the land of Apadia is plundered and wasted to the preference of the Enemy, with scant few outposts of good folk who still continue to fight against his machinations. Khâm is even overrun with evildoers, while good folk still infest it and thwart the plans of the Enemy there. I served my part there, and in Tarisir, and in the Wastelands, and escaped from there back to Wakoku, and then back across the Arctic Sea in my kayak. I see a preparation for invasion of Sarapadia on the southern sea coast near Kîmet, but I don’t know how they could sail between the coast and Am-Khûr, and still land on the coast near Kîmet without the Gnomes and Dwarves sinking their ships on the rocks by controlling the tides or using their machines to send them either underwater or to the currents of Am-Khûr where the island awaits to feast upon them.”
