Jes'Tamaline
Jes'Tamaline is a spirit local to the Riverwood area of the Turamzzyrian Empire.
Citizens of Riverwood often practice rites to honor Jes'Tamaline, a local spirit of the many rivers of Riverwood. If Jes'Tamaline is dishonored, it is said that the trees will bear no fruit, that deer will hear a hunter's footsteps from seven miles away, and that all the fish rivers will dry to dust with all their fish transformed to stone. Jes'Tamaline is honored on the last day of Ivastaen by singing songs in her honor, dancing through the woods, and garlanding people and trees with flowers. It is also custom for maidens in their first year of womanhood to spend Jes'Tamaline's night sleeping in the wood, so that the spirit will guide them and advise them. According to Riverwood legend, in hundreds of years of this ritual, no women have ever been injured in wild beast attacks or accidents in the darkness during Jes'Tamaline's night.
Legend claims that, centuries before Helt was founded, there was a terrible plague in the land later known as Riverwood, and all the streams were fouled. While other mortals wept for their own lives, there was one, a hermit, who wept for the death of the forest itself. Imaera had intended to let the plague run its course, as natural events must, but the hermit's grief attracted and touched her. When the hermit died, Lorminstra gifted the hermit's soul to Imaera, and the hermit arose out of death by Imaera's will as a nature spirit, so that she might protect the wilderness she had loved forever. Thus Jes'Tamaline came to be.
Jes'Tamaline Night is a celebration honoring the local spirit, which occurs on the last night of Ivastaen.
There is also an organization in the Turamzzyrian Empire dedicated to the spirit, called the Reeds of Jes'Tamaline.